(Electronic Literature) John Cayley - Grammalepsy - Essays On Digital Language Art (2018)

Grammalepsy
ELECTRONIC LITERATURE
Volume 1
Series editors:
Helen Burgess, Dene Grigar, Rui Torres, María Mencía
Electronic Literature Organization

Grammalepsy
Essays on Digital
Language Art
John Cayley
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CONTENTS
List of Figures vi
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Grammalepsy: An Introduction 1
1 Beyond Codexspace 15
2 Pressing the “REVEAL CODE” key 33

3 Of Programmatology 47
4 The Code Is Not the Text (Unless It Is the Text) 53
5 Hypertext/Cybertext/Poetext 67
6 Writing on Complex Surfaces 79
7 Time Code Language 95
8 The Gravity of the Leaf 115
9 Writing to Be Found and Writing Readers 133
10 Weapons of the Deconstructive Masses (WDM) 147
11 Terms of Reference & Vectoralist Transgressions 165
12 Reading and Giving: Voice and Language 185
13 Reconfiguration 199
14 At the End of Literature 211
Notes 221
Bibliography 268
Index 282
LIST OF FIGURES
1.1 T
wo screenshots from wine flying showing, above, the
entire text of the translation of the quatrain by Qian Qi
(ACE ? 722–80) and, below, a fragment representing
an alternative “path” through the poem. The words in
this fragment were displayed in the order: “turquoise
butterfly flying under scarlet flowers.” Reproductions
reflect the contemporary resolution of Apple
Macintosh displays. Courtesy of the author 19
1.2 Screenshot from Under It All. This is the version of the
piece as it appears in Moods & Conjunctions: Indra’s
Net III. Courtesy of the author 22
1.3 Scaled-down, monochrome version of the
“three-dimensional” poster poem of Under It All.
Courtesy of the author 23
1.4 Screenshot from “Critical Theory” in Collocations:
Indra’s Net II. Courtesy of the author 24
1.5 Screenshot from Golden Lion: Indra’s Net IV.
1.6 John Cayley, Text of “Actual possession
of the world …” lines gleaned at average
collocational strictness 386/500 from Leaving the City.
1.7 Four seasonal screenshots from The Speaking Clock
show the times: (a) 12:11, (b) 12:14, (c) 12:20 and
(d) 12:26, all on November 1, 1995. Courtesy of the
author 29
LIST OF FIGURES vii
6.1 Still from the opening titles, designed by Saul Bass,

for The Man with the Golden Arm, directed by Otto
Preminger, United Artists, 1955 83
6.2 Still from the opening titles, designed by Saul Bass, for
Anatomy of a Murder, directed by Otto Preminger,
Columbia Pictures, 1959 84
6.3 Three stills from the opening titles, designed by Saul
Bass, for North by Northwest, directed by Alfred
Hitchcock, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1959 85
6.4 Screenshot from overboard. Courtesy of the author 88
6.5 Screenshot from translation. Courtesy of the author 89
6.6 Photograph from an immersive digital language art
piece, taken in the Brown University Cave, showing
the anomalous “corridor” effect produced by layered
letters with disordered transparencies. Courtesy of the
author 91
6.7 Photograph from an immersive digital language art
piece, taken in the Brown University Cave, showing
linguistically implicated layering effects. Courtesy of the
author 92
7.1 Screenshot from The Barrier Frames. Courtesy of Jim
Rosenberg 105
7.2 Screenshot from Intergrams. Courtesy of Jim
Rosenberg 105
7.3 Screenshot from Intergrams. Courtesy of Jim
Rosenberg 106
7.4 Illustration from Literary Machines 93.1, p. 2/14.
Courtesy of Ted Nelson 109
8.1 Photographs taken during a showing of Glitch, 2008, by
Jason Lee, Ben Nicholson, and Jinaabah Showa: writing
for the Cave immersive 3D audiovisual environment,
Brown University, Center for Computation and
viii LIST OF FIGURES
Visualization. Photographs courtesy of Francisco J.

Ricardo 117
12.1 John Baldessari. The Duress Series: Person Climbing
Exterior Wall of Tall Building/Person on Ledge of Tall
Building/Person on Girders of Unfinished Tall Building,
2003. Digital photographic print with acrylic on
Sintra. 60 × 180 inches. Reproduction courtesy of John
Baldessari 189
12.2 Illustration, a–d, demonstrating the catastrophic
emergence of linguistic diegesis. Digital photographs,
2013. Courtesy of the author 191
12.3 Screenshots based on a digital print by the author,
Monoclonal Microphone, 1020+1, 2011. Courtesy of
the author 192
13.1 One of a still growing archive of images—this is tagged
“redmon”—from Postcards from Google Earth by
Clement Valla, 2010. Courtesy of the artist 202
13.2 The cover and four pages (on two openings) from
Francesca Capone’s Primary Source. Courtesy of the
artist 208
PREFACE
Grammalepsy brings together, for the first time, my selected essays, a number
of which are considered formative for the theory and practice of electronic
literature. I prefer to reread them within a larger domain of theory and
practice: digital language art. Hence the subtitle.
I am a pioneering practitioner of digital language art, poetic in particular,
with a research-based practice dating back to the late 1970s. My first for-
publication work of digital language art, wine flying, was issued on 3.5"
floppy disk by my own Wellsweep Press in 1989–90 as well as being installed
and exhibited at various venues in the United Kingdom. The same processes
of dissemination applied, for example, to Book Unbound, 1995. The earliest
essay in this collection, “Beyond Codexspace,” dates from 1996, and the
latest from 2017.
This book is provided with an original introduction that offers its readers
what amounts to a theory of aesthetic linguistic practice and also, to an
extent, a theory of language itself, one that is intended to be particularly
appropriate for the making and critical appreciation of language art in
digital media. These collected essays have been gently edited in order to
enhance the coherence of the whole. The notes and citations associated
with the essays have been more extensively edited, to bring them a little
more up-to-date and to ensure that they are as readable and as useable as
possible.
The introduction eschews the tendency of literary critics and writers,
including theorists and critics of electronic literature, to reduce aesthetic
linguistic making—even when it has multimedia affordances—to “writing.”
Many of the essays collected here were content with this conventional and
theoretical catastrophe. I argue that language is media-agnostic, and I take
an approach to the philosophy and, indeed, the ontology of language that
follows Jacques Derrida in this regard. Language animals, on the other
hand, have evolved or learned to make language in only two support
media: aurality and grammatological visuality. Our prejudice with regard
to literature—that typographic embodiments of language house its uniquely
high art—is merely learned, a function of civilization. The art of language,
heedless of civilization, is always also embodied in artifacts that exist as
aurality, because aural expression correlates with the predisposition of the
only language animals of which we are aware: ourselves.
x PREFACE
The collection of essays in Grammalepsy brings its author and its

readers to certain horizons of this thought, a way of thinking that has
become possible, historically, due to the rise of digital mediation. Electronic
literature or, as I prefer, digital language art allowed aesthetically inclined
language makers to embrace a compositional practice that is inextricably
involved with digital media, including the computational modulation and
generation of text. The making of certain linguistic artifacts, not only their
presentation, not only their reading, cannot be achieved without digital
media and digital affordances. This is clearly demonstrable for a number of
important works, including works by myself. Digital textuality cannot be
reduced to print-dependent textuality.
Digital mediation will, however, have even greater effects on language and
language art. The grammatization of linguistic aurality—enabling indexed
access and archive—will, for example, offer our cultures the potential to
shift the central focus of its most significant and affective linguistic practice
from literature to aurature, not “back” but “forward” to the support
medium for language to which human animals are genetically predisposed.
The author discovers the process by which this grammatization occurs to be
at the heart of linguistic ontology: as grammalepsis. We all are in the grip of
Grammalepsy and we always have been.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Despite our inevitable discontents and the constant vigilance that is

required in the struggle to maintain justice and care, institutions sustain
us and allow us to do what we do. There are a number of institutions,
within which I have worked, that have supported me in this way, first and
foremost the institution of the university, in its general form, which I fear is
unjustly under threat these days. My studies at the University of Durham, in
Chinese language and civilization, were publicly funded. I can acknowledge
with some pleasure both this university and the state that allowed me to
discover linguistic computation early on in my career, and particularly the
late Archie Barnes, my teacher. Then, there is the British Library, where I
worked for a time; and Hanshan Tang Books in London, a tiny institution.
Its founder-owner Christer von der Burg took a special interest in the culture
of computation and I couldn’t have done some of what I have without my
colleagues at the Tang and Christer’s support. Special thanks are also due
to Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris who, close to the beginning of it all,
included poetic extracts of “Reveal Code” in their “institutional” Poems for
the Millennium, 2. Most importantly, however, Brown University and what
is now its Department of Literary Arts continue to employ me and have
sustained this work full-time since 2007. Robert Coover made it all possible,
“as the world knows Bob period.”
I am daunted at the prospect of making a list of all those other individuals
who have helped me with my work or helped me to understand it better. In
large measure I’m going to let the alphabet excuse me from the burden of
invidious fine distinctions, and use it to make two lists: one for those people
who, I somehow feel, have been more directly concerned with what appears
in this book, and a second list for those with whom I have enjoyed sharing
the broader endeavor that is represented by this book and related work. So,
in the first place, my acknowledgments and thanks go out to: Espen Aarseth,
Sandy Baldwin, Philippe Bootz, Douglas Cape, cris cheek, Florian Cramer,
Johanna Drucker, Markku Eskelinen, Aden Evens, Penny Florence, Chris
Funkhouser, Loss Pequeño Glazier, N. Katherine Hayles, Daniel C. Howe,
David Jhave Johnston, Nick Montfort, Judd Morrissey, Giles Perring, Søren
Pold, Manuel Portela, Rita Raley, Joan Retallack, Scott Rettberg, Francisco
J. Ricardo, Andrew Michael Roberts, Jim Rosenberg, Roberto Simanowski,
Brian Kim Stefans, Stephanie Strickland, Joseph Tabbi, Eugenio Tisselli,
xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Clement Valla, Noah Wardrip-Fruin. And also to: Mark Amerika, Caroline
Bergvall, Charles Bernstein, Tim Bewes, Friedrich Block, Stephanie Boluk,
Mauro Carassai, Wendy Chun, Maria Damon, Lori Emerson, Maria
Engberg, Jerome Fletcher, Luciana Gattass, Harry Gilonis, Simon Gunn,
Terry Harpold, Robert E. Harrist Jr., Ian Hatcher, Will Hicks, Romana Huk,
Elizabeth James, Michael Joyce, Eduardo Kac, Andrew Klobucar, Raine
Koskimaa, Mark Leahy, Patrick LeMieux, Alan Liu, Talan Memmott, Maria
Mencia, Adalaide Morris, Stuart Moulthrop, Robert Mosley, Elli Mylonas,
Chris Novello, Eric Dean Rasmussen, Denise Riley, Massimo Riva, Will
Rowe, Jörgen Schaefer, Bill Seaman, Álvaro Seiça Neves, Ana Marques
da Silva, Hazel Smith, Braxton Soderman, Alan Sondheim, Ben Swanson,
Thomas Swiss, Illya Szilak, Lori Talley, Steve Tomasula, Patricia Tomaszek,
Greg Ulmer, John Welch, Yang Lian. I should say that a number of these
people have been my students but that, in addition, I owe a great debt of
gratitude to all my students, all of whom have helped me think and make.
With regard to this publication and its production, it is a pleasure to
thank my instantly helpful and responsive initial editor at Bloomsbury
Academic, Mary Al-Sayed, and also Katie Gallof and Erin Duffy who took
charge of the book in its final stages.
Finally, to Joanna Howard, for everything, and in particular for believing
that, after all this, I might still finish my vampire novel.
These essays appeared over an extended period in a wide range of
magazines, journals, and online resources. Details follow (with more
information in the bibliography). I would like to thank the editors and
publishers for their generous reception of the work and for their kind
permission, where necessary, to reproduce the essays here.
“Beyond Codexspace.” Apart from its original publication in the journal
Visible Language, 1996, this essay was translated into Finnish for Parnasso,
3 (1999), pp. 290–302, and was also collected, with revisions, for Media
Poetry: An International Anthology, 2007, edited by Eduardo Kac.
“Pressing the ‘REVEAL CODE’ Key” was published, 1996, in one of the
first online-only academic journals, EJournal. (This term is now almost as
impossible to search effectively on the internet as would be “Journal” as an
eponymous proper name.)
“Of Programmatology,” came out, 1998, in the radical London-based
new media arts and culture magazine, Mute.
“The Code Is Not the Text (Unless It Is the Text)” was originally sketched
out for the “p0es1s: Poetics of digital text” symposion [sic], held in Erfurt,
September 28–29, and first published, 2002, in the Electronic Book Review,
a vital journal for the field of electronic literature and digital language art.
“Hypertext/Cybertext/Poetext” was presented as a paper at the conference
“Assembling Alternatives,” University of New Hampshire, Durham, August
29–September 2, 1996. This conference was important for introducing a
transatlantic community of experimental writers, chiefly poets, to digital
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii
language art. I maintain an online, mildly transactive, version of the essay

on my personal website at http://programmatology.shadoof.net/works/
hypercyberpoetext/. This includes the accompanying, generated mesostic
text, “X,” not reprinted here, which was, however, included in the book
of conference proceedings, Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern
Poetries Transnationally, 2003, edited by Romana Huk. Reprinted by
permission of Wesleyan University Press.
“Writing on Complex Surfaces.” This essay was first presented as a paper
at the 6th Digital Arts & Culture conference, held at the IT University in
Copenhagen, December 1–3, 2005. It was then published in the online
journal, also crucial for our field, dichtung digital, 2005, edited by Roberto
Simanowski.
“Time Code Language” is loosely based on a presentation to the
“New Media Poetics” conference, held at the University of Iowa, October
11–12, 2002, facilitated by Thomas Swiss and Adelaide (Dee) Morris,
to whom, along with Sarah Townsend, I owe a debt of thanks for their
comments on early drafts. Thanks are also due to N. Katherine Hayles
for her correspondence, comments, and unstinting intellectual generosity.
Professors Swiss and Morris went on to edit New Media Poetics: Contexts,
Technotexts, and Theories, 2006, in which the essay was first published.
Reprinted by permission of MIT Press.
“The Gravity of the Leaf” was first presented as “Surface Text: Text
as Surface in Immersive 3D Environments” for the “Beyond the Screen”
conference devoted to the aesthetics and criticism of digital literature,
Siegen, Germany, November 19–21, 2008. I am grateful to Sandy Baldwin
and, especially, to Francisco J. Ricardo for reading drafts of the essay in its
present form and offering helpful and stimulating comments. Proceedings of
the conference were later published in Beyond the Screen: Transformations
of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres, 2010, edited by Peter Gendolla
and Jörgen Schäfer. Reprinted by permission of Transcript Verlag.
“Writing to Be Found and Writing Readers” is based on and extended
from a presentation entitled “Edges of Chaos: Writing to Be Found” for
a workshop at the University of Bergen, Norway, November 8–10, 2009.
The final essay resulted from a keynote paper at the Futures of Digital
Studies conference, University of Florida, February 25–27, 2010. It was first
published in 2011 by Digital Humanities Quarterly.
“Weapons of the Deconstructive Masses (WDM).” This paper was
originally prepared as a presentation for: “Visionary Landscapes,” a
conference of the Electronic Literature Organization, May 29–June 1, 2008,
Vancouver, Washington. A number of colleagues and friends have read this
paper since it was first presented. I would like to thank Roberto Simanowski
and Aden Evens for particularly detailed and helpful comments. A version
of the first part of the paper was published, 2009, in the online journal
xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, and the full essay was first published,
2011, in Revista de Estudos Literários.
“Terms of Reference & Vectoralist Transgressions” was published, 2013,
in the online journal Amodern.
“Reading and Giving—Voice and Language” was first published in a
special issue of the journal, Performance Research, “On Writing and Digital
Media,” edited by Jerome Fletcher, 2013. Reprinted by permission of Taylor
& Francis Ltd.
“Reconfiguration” was published, 2017, in a special issue of the
online journal Humanities, “The Poetics of Computation,” edited by Burt
Kimmelman and Andrew Klobucar.
“At the End of Literature.” This is the second, final, and independent
part of a longer piece published as “The Advent of Aurature and the End
of (Electronic) Literature” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic
Literature, 2017, edited by Joseph Tabbi. Reprinted here by kind permission
of the editor and Bloomsbury Academic.
Grammalepsy: An Introduction
It was only a few months prior to the gathering of these chapters that I
discovered that I had grammalepsy. Or, rather, I determined that we are
all of us, language animals, in the grip of this condition. We are seized by
it, and singled out in its thrall, whenever we encounter or make more of
the language, the languages, that we have. Linguists, historians of language,
scientists studying evolution, philosophers, and philosophers of language
are all able to affirm that human beings “have” language, but this is one of
the very few things on which they do agree and they do so, in part, as an
admission of ignorance—concerning essential details of the when, the how,
the why, and, in particular, the what of this species-unique facility—not a
trait exactly, because it requires interaction. Language cannot exist for one
without others.
So, we—the plural is essential—have, and can use, and can make things
with, language. And some philosophers of language also suggest that it has
us, or that we dwell within it; that language uses and forms us. We live,
in any case, in relations with language that alternate and unravel in terms
of who or what determines the practices and performances of whoever
or whatever we are—languages and ourselves—when we speak and read.
Rather than taking a determinate, prescription-inducing stance on the nature
and characteristics of some predominant relationship between humans and
language (or language and humans), I preferred, even before discovering
that I had grammalepsy, to work with language as a maker, as if it was
my medium, and, thus, to learn about language in practice. I compared my
practice with that of other makers in other media. And occasionally, I also
made other kinds of artifacts in other media.
One of the things that I learned about language is that its “materiality”
is singular, or, rather, that the way in which language comes to be is
singular—embodied by and fashioned to exist as humanly perceptible
material phenomena.1 For, whatever language is, it cannot be identified—
essentially or substantively—with anything that is materially perceptible to
2 GRAMMALEPSY: ESSAYS ON DIGITAL LANGUAGE ART
us. Obviously, I’m bracketing certain conceptions of materiality—placing

materiality into the phenomenological epoché. This will be clear to you
because, for a start, I am trying to engage, explicitly, with an ontology of
language. I say that language exists. Moreover, I accept many aspects of
what would be characterized as a “materialist” philosophy of language in
that, for example, I can work with the notion of “semiotic material,” and
I believe that linguistic artifacts have real effects, not only in so far as they
operate symbolically or in terms of signification, but also in terms of their
affective force, the force of language.
Grammalepsy is, as I say, a condition of language animals. It is not a
pathology, unless we think of language itself as a pathology (as some people
do, despite the likelihood that thinking itself must suffer, necessarily, from
the same malaise). Grammalepsy is, nonetheless, a symptom of our “having”
language. And it does, I believe, bear a relationship with pharmacology. It may
be poisonous for certain aspects of human experience at certain times and,
all at once, it may be rendered experientially therapeutic when administered
with care. The condition is symptomatic of a process, grammalepsis, that
I have come to understand as constitutive for linguistic ontology. We
behave and we gesture—we set out to inscribe—in our attempts to make
language, but language as such only comes into being when we succeed
in grammalepsis, when our gestures become readable—to ourselves and to
others—when they can be read as the grammē of (a) language.
Another way of putting this is simply to say that language comes into
being as a function of reading. I do not, of course, mean by this that
language, somehow, depends on writing for its existence. The gestures of
inscription that I speak of are heedless of support media—with which, as
I’ve already said, language cannot be identified. These gestures are referred
to grammatology, within which writing as such serves to provide us with
a better way of understanding the practices of language in terms of their
general principles (and the metaphysical consequences). Writing has,
historically, materialized differently with respect to speech, but reading—
grammaleptic reading, the reading of grammē—has remained what it was,
regardless of actual linguistic practices in visually perceptible graphics.
The etymology of “[to]read,” in English, supports this media agnosticism,
deriving (as I read it) from something like the ability to make well-advised,
convincing guesses.
If we are happy to say (in plain English) that reading brings language
into being, then what is the point of inventing a new word for an implicated
symptom? What is the point of grammalepsy? For one thing, the intimate
association of reading with actual, historical writing is a problem for us. It
nudges us toward a misdirection to which we have already alluded. Our
civilizations are founded on writing and thus also on reading (of literal
graphic forms), but our civilizations are as nothing when compared with
the eventualities of biological evolution that gave us—that allowed us to
GRAMMALEPSY: AN INTRODUCTION 3
“have”—language. And our evolutionary disposition is unlikely to change

any time soon. The brain plasticity that allows us to adopt literal reading
and writing with extraordinary facility does not imply that we have evolved
with respect to language.
More pragmatically, there are the implications of “-lepsis.” This
suffix captures and expresses an important overall characteristic of the
manifold processes of reading that bring language into being. It suggests
seizure, sudden seizure, the “grasp” of something that we experience as
we encounter elements of language that we can understand or can use
to understand. This characteristic of grammaleptic reading is, I believe,
underappreciated and possesses significant theoretical potential. It indicates
the threshold, for example, between expressive gesture and actual language.
Gesture remains gesture until, suddenly, it is seized by grammalepsy and
thus becomes a sign within the discrete, structured world of language,
within a particular language. In the case of sign languages, this abstract
analogy becomes “literal.” Gestures made by someone who does not know
a natural sign language remain gestures. But once they are grasped within
a practice of language, they become, suddenly, something different. They
become language. Grammalepsy helps us to locate and specify the horizons
of language.
Grammalepsy also helps to explain how and when phenomenon with
wildly various, apparently continuous interrelations of substance and form
can suddenly be grasped and read as signs. Or, rather, it cannot explain
exactly “how” this happens but it reminds us that it happens suddenly—I
used to think and say, catastrophically—once substantive forms have, in their
shifting morphologies, passed a threshold that causes them to be recognized
as: distinct phonemes or letters, words, phrases, clauses, sentences. Past this
threshold, substantive forms that were once in the world of material things
are suddenly also in the world of language.2 And once they have entered
language, unless they lose or abandon the form that they have achieved—a
phonologically or orthographically readable shape—they cannot go back.
They will remain distinctly separated from other forms, even forms of the
same material substance, in so far as they remain readable.
If we consider certain problems of language in general—with respect
to translation for example—and (other) natural languages (“other” in the
sense of those that we do not know), grammalepsy also helps us. Why
should a language that we do not know be so absolutely incomprehensible
to us despite our sense that the people who know it are talking and writing
about the same experiences? Grammalepsy suggests that, at every level
of linguistic structure, there is no reason for any of the forms in another
language to be graspable, to be readable, until they (suddenly) are—until
they are learned, known, and seized upon—since, until they are, these forms
are simply gestures, just unreadable parts of our perceptual world, gesturing
toward language, without having reached its threshold, not, at least, for us.3
Why set out, in an introduction to this book, by proposing and then

beginning to explain a new term that is designed for a philosophy of
language? Because it helps me to understand what I have done and what I
was trying to do while making the aesthetic work that underpins much of
the theory in these expositions. Specifically, grammalepsy helps me to grasp
important characteristics of my chosen medium, and, because I also work
with digital media—networked and programmable media—it is crucial, I
believe, to be able to single out a particular medium and determine what it is
that I am doing with it, especially when aesthetics are at stake. Grammalepsy
reminds me that it is precisely the sudden change it makes to the materiality
of a medium—at the moment of grammalepsis—that brings language into
being and thus, ontologically, distinguishes it from any and all substantive
media within which it must, nonetheless, simultaneously, be embodied. If my
concern is an art of language, then it follows that I will work with language
and with digital media in the knowledge that the latter will influence and
inflect the when and the how and the why of grammalepsis but not necessarily
the what of the language that grammalepsis brings into being—the language
that is made readable. My aesthetic responsibilities for language art and for
its digital situation are distinct. This practical and theoretical orientation is
quite different from that of many other practitioners in the field that usually
goes by the name of electronic literature.
Because of its explicit association with grammatology, grammalepsy
also helps me to recall and maintain the principle of media agnosticism
with respect to language art, to apply this principle whenever writing and
literature are evoked. Writing and literature are overdetermined by their
implicit media—archival publication in print, and practices of writing in
a visuality that is constrained, typically, to literary forms or, of necessity,
to literal forms. As the final chapter of this selection, “At the End of
Literature,” claims, I believe that one of the most significant future cultural
potentialities—as digital affordances continue to be applied to language—
will be the reconfiguration of the relationship between language practices
and their predominant support media. In principle, the digitalization of
culture will give rise to an aurature that is able to contest the traditional
sovereign claims of literature.
For the practice of language art in digital media, grammalepsy lends
us perspective on a particular and a particularly critical issue. This is the
question of the status, the ontology, the significance and affect of the synthetic,
or, perhaps, virtual “language” that is generated by algorithmic processes.
Related questions are taken up by the chapter “Reading and Giving,” within
which grammalepsy is discussed before, as it were, I had learned what best to
call it. Not all the practices of digital language art call for “text generation.”
Indeed, much that is produced or studied as “electronic literature” bears
little relation with computation that is compositionally involved with
fashioning its incorporated language. On the other hand, algorithmic
text generation, translation, and reconfiguration are all important in my

own work and in that of a number of colleagues, some of whose work is
discussed here. Moreover, since the passing of an AI (artificial intelligence)
winter into its spring during the 2010s, the ascendency and popularization
of natural language processing (NLP), the aggregation of vast quantities of
statistically analyzed “big data” for natural languages, and the application
of neural net and recursive neural net technologies to linguistic corpora,
all of these factors and others mean that there is an ocean of generated
artificial language out there, especially on the internet, ostensibly readable
by language animals. This is a world of materially existing linguistic forms
within which digital language artists must now make their own interventions
and artifacts. Grammalepsy offers, in this context, a way of reflecting on
and perhaps judging the relative artificiality or virtuality of algorithmically
generated language. For, although all literally inscribed (and thus encoded)
language has been grasped by a symbolic order that is continuous with
contemporary computation, grammalepsy indicates an analogous but
distinct process that is defined by reading, the reading performed by the
only language animals that are known to us. When elements of language are
grasped and thus brought into being as language through grammalepsis, this
is not to say, reductively, that they have (just) been “parsed” and processed
by a formal computational system. The material presence of language-like
tokens within encoded computational structures does not guarantee their
linguistic ontology—not until, in some manner, grammalepsis has also taken
place. Within the computational order, traces of actual language and tokens
of synthetic or virtual language are materially indistinguishable, but this
does not mean that they are the same thing. And it is vital, in my opinion,
that human readers remain capable of distinguishing actual language from
synthetic “language,” especially those readers who are also practitioners and
theorists of digital language art.
There is also, simply, the reason—for introducing grammalepsy in this
introduction—that it represents thinking and theory to which my practice
has brought me. It is an outcome in itself, part of a final, if unfinished,
chapter.
The essays selected for these chapters span a relatively lengthy period of
time—from the mid-1990s down to the time of writing, in the late 2010s—
longer than might be expected of comparable collections. Given the pace of
change in digitally mediated culture, this period may seem even longer, one
during which its early artifacts must surely appear to have dated significantly
if not catastrophically. I was pleasantly surprised to find that, although
much of the work referred to in these pages has ceased to be supported on
contemporary platforms, its underlying principles of composition and the
associated theory still have something to offer.
This book is by someone who identifies, first, as a practitioner, a translator
and poet-turned-digital poet and (digital) language artist. But I am the
kind of practitioner who never works without a more or less articulated

theoretical understanding of what it is that I am trying to do, and I have
endeavored to take this self-reflexive understanding seriously, siting it in
the context of literary criticism, poetics, critical theory, and cultural studies.
The essays collected here always aimed to be engaged with their proximate
critical discourses. They do, however, gravitate around my own production,
and thus, this self-reflexive theory tends to involve more reference to my own
work than to that of my colleagues. This selection’s first chapter, “Beyond
Codexspace,” is, in particular, more of a description of work, more of an
artist’s talk, than a developed thought or argument. This is excusable, I trust,
in so far as it provides the reader with some initial context, by populating
the book with initial examples of practice for which, at the time, literary and
poetic theory barely accounted.
I have, of course, reread all of the chapters in this book and done a
little light editing of their main texts. There is more of this for the earlier
chapters, rendering their allusions to contemporary circumstances a little
more relevant, or general, or up-to-date. The notes throughout have been
more extensively edited. To the best of my knowledge and abilities, I’ve
brought references, especially internet references, up-to-date. I’ve also tried
to use URLs that will persist, and I have checked for accessibility, and
included most recent access dates in the bibliography. Links for which I was
responsible but which have broken since first publication have been repaired
or substituted. I have had to remove a few links that were irreparable, and I
apologize in anticipation of those broken links that will surely remain.
There are a number of obsessions that run in threads throughout these
chapters. By way of brief introduction, I will follow some of these threads,
aiming to touch on each of the chapters at least once, where appropriate,
and link their thinking to the more general entanglement.
From well before the 1990s and even today, after more than two decades
of hyperhistory, the media that concern us—networked and programmable
media in my terms—have been characterized as “new.” Newly perceptible
phenomena call for—and are brought into language by—new terms, and the
field within which I have practiced and theorized is beset with the problem
of naming. I was and am as much a part of the problem as anyone. In 2008,
I tried to settle some of the issues in the “Weapons of the Deconstructive
Masses” (WDM) but singularly failed, since I hadn’t then come up with
the term with which I am now content. The field I work within is “digital
language art.” “Literary art” is a highly privileged subfield of language art,
but this name concedes relations with both literal media ([typo]graphic
media) and “the literary” as an assertion of cultivated values which are
implicated with particular canons and traditions of practice. “Language art”
specifies a medium without the implicit commitment to particular support
media, while “art,” at the head of the phrase, asserts a pragmatic intimacy
with art as it is practiced in other media. I always balked at “electronic” and
at all the various “e-” and “i-” prefixes. Except by analogy with “electronic
music” (where “electronic” indicates technicity and a very wide range of
actual electronic sound-making and recording instruments), it seemed to me
foolish for aesthetic language practices to establish inappropriate material
associations from the get-go, especially in the context of computation, given
the latter’s singular, problematic materiality. But just as electronic music
has an established tradition and nomenclature (although for longer than
its literary bedfellow), electronic literature has now, along with a canon of
sorts, an established place in the academy and, to an extent, in the world of
letters.
As for the “digital” of digital language art, this is also a problem given
that an art of language is our purpose. The last chapter in this book—
although concerning itself only minimally with these questions of naming—
states it clearly, “The digital … is not a medium. More precisely, it is not a
medium of interest to the majority of theorists or practitioners of those arts
for which language is the medium.” In the future, I expect digital language
art to go the way of digital art. There is art, but no one need mention that
it is “digital” because art is simply part of a culture that is also, inevitably,
historically digital, and these circumstances have little to tell us concerning
the significance or affect of the art as such.
Apart from in “WDM,” questions surrounding nomenclature are taken up,
particularly, in “Beyond Codexspace,” “Of Programmatology,” and “Hyper/
Cybertext/Poetext.” Summarizing, I preferred “digital” to “electronic” and,
albeit hopelessly, “programmaton” for “computer.” “Programmatology”
is a more or less playful and obvious allusion to Jacques Derrida’s
“grammatology.” For a time, once having settled in a university department
for which “creative writing” underlay, institutionally, its “literary arts,” I
determined to call what I did with my colleagues and students “writing digital
media,” but I have abandoned even the nice ambiguities of this phrase’s
grammar and its medial hostage to fortune, as outlined above. One of the
phrases for which I credit myself and which I still find useful is “networked
and programmable media.” The programmability of both compositional
and delivery media—once encoded instantiations of substantive media
became available—was and is something that distinguishes these media
and their potentialities. The actual creation by these same programmable
media of what we now think of as the network, and their broadcast life in
the new world of information, gave programmable media overwhelming
quantifiable power by which, in practice, they are also specified and
qualified. Not “digital” then, but “programmable” and “networked.” The
insufficiently anticipated non-mutuality of emergent network architectures
is another matter, and we will return to this.
Initially, “cybertext”—which no longer seems to figure despite the
continuing influence of Espen Aarseth’s eponymous monograph—presented
itself as a much more inclusive and catholic term as compared with
“hypertext” when these circulated together in the first decade of accessible

digital language art. I associated hypertext with the long-form fiction that
predominated in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, during the initial, broader
dissemination of digitally mediated writing (writing as it most definitely then
was). Given my background in the translation of poetry (from Chinese) and
also as a poet per se, I was resistant to the predominance of a form that was,
programmatically, formally, and poetically straightforward, relatively so,
and that remained largely uninvolved with the composition—the generation
and modulation—of a work’s constitutive language. My work was part of
an informal factional intervention that encouraged practitioners who were
beginning to self-identify as electronic writers to involve themselves with
historically contextualized poetics, especially experimental and innovative
poetics, and, at the same time, to encourage poetic practitioners to take
digital mediation seriously with regard to both criticism and composition.
“Pressing the ‘REVEAL CODE’ Key,” “Of Programmatology,” in particular
“Hypertext/Cybertext/Poetext,” and “Time Code Language” are all situated
at this juncture, offering both critique and collaborative common ground.
“The Code Is Not the Text (Unless It Is the Text)” is my most influential
essay in the field. It is impossible to discount or exaggerate what code and
coding can and will do for practices of language. This chapter, however, asks
us to tread carefully when we try to understand the relationships between
practices of coding and practices of language, to know what we are doing
when we treat one as the other, or acknowledge a hybrid “codework.” My
position is still that code is not natural, human language at any level. Code is
practiced entirely within the framework of formal, usually Turing-complete
computer languages, but “language” in this phrase has a constrained and far
different meaning to the one it has, even in everyday speech. The elements
and formal structures of code can be easily introduced into language, but
the elements and structures (even the formally expressible structures) of
language cannot easily be introduced into code as such (other than as quoted
strings) and, if they could be, then the code would no longer be code. “The
Code Is Not the Text” asks language artists who work in programmable
media to remember what they are working with.
In common with many artists who have, at some point, identified
themselves as writers, I am fascinated by the surface(s) on which we write.
For most of us, this resolves to a fascination with the book and its culture,
an extraordinary world, with no sign of ending any time soon. Jacques
Derrida’s expansive notions concerning what “the book” and “paper”
may still become have more distant horizons than those of many more
materially focused critiques. Clearly, however, those of us who work with
programmable media present themselves with strangely mediated surfaces,
as well as with innovative instruments that inscribe these surfaces. Today,
in the developed world, this is, essentially, true for all writers.4 A screen,
displaying a surface, usually made up of light-colored pixels, is interrupted
and thus “inscribed” with dark-colored pixels. On the one hand, it appears
to us that the surfaces on which we write have become impossibly complex
at levels beyond our perceptual horizons; on the other, linguistic inscription
is, as it always was, a play of the most fundamental and abstract possible
difference—dark against light, 0 and 1.
Quite apart from screens, I have also had the privilege of working with
writing—language art—for immersive stereo 3D audiovisual instruments.
In the graphics world that these instruments project, language can be
inscribed in the articulated light of artificial space, perceptible to us as like
the space within which we live habitually. In “The Gravity of the Leaf”
and “Writing on Complex Surfaces,” I discuss this aspect of my practice
and attempt to explore the potential “complexities” of inscription’s surfaces.
There are important problems here, which these chapters do not resolve,
and do not do so, perhaps in part, for strategic, pragmatic reasons. My
understanding of the complex surface took inspiration from my reading
of Joan Retallack as cited at the beginning of “Writing on Complex
Surfaces.” But for writers and poets, like Retallack, the “complexity” of the
writing surface is figurative—although no less real in terms of significance
and affect—and this may be all it ever needs to be. Poetic practices—or
the “poethical” practices that Retallack proposes—are more than enough
to render the inscribed surface as fractal, invaginated, complex. In digital
language art, the complexity of a writing surface can be actualized (shying
away from the overdetermination of “literalized”), but may nonetheless risk
performing a “(philosophically) ‘thin’ literal materiality.”5 This risk, when
combined with underappreciation of language’s singular materiality—its
ontological distinction from its support media—can create problems for the
critical reading of digital language art.
A particular variety of practice, emergent from my engagement with the
inscription of graphic language in artificial 3D, remains unambiguously
complex for me in terms of inscriptional surfaces. This kind of practice
takes place at the horizon of text and paratext and is characterized by the
(mis)placing of textual or figurative graphic forms such that they themselves
become surfaces for inscription. In the world of 2D graphics, the work of
Saul Bass represents exemplary practice of this kind, in designs where flat
figurative forms not only provide paratextual, design-functional “rules” but
also make surfaces for letter-formed words. In immersive virtual reality (or
simply on the 2D-for-3D of the computer screen), graphic forms can be made
both to give passage into spaces that are “beyond” the surfaces on which
they appear to be inscribed, while simultaneously serving as surfaces for the
graphic forms of inscriptions that may be indeterminately situated. So long
as they are readable, they could be either “in front of” or “beyond, through
the window of” the forms-serving-as-surfaces that support their readability.
My maquette, Lens, demonstrates this complexity. From the perspective
of language art, it is important to note that, whatever the modeled spatial
arrangement of the graphic elements may be, when they become readable
as language, their spatial relations collapse for the purposes of taking up
existence on the singular surface of language. Or, in other words, through
grammalepsis, as we read what they say, these forms become language
and allow us to enter the linguistic dimension of experience. For me, such
phenomena, actually perceptible in immersive virtual reality, create a
conceptual rhyme with certain believers’ experience of the icon. An icon is
not a representation; it is a threshold, a form that gives access to the thing
itself, allowing the artist and believer not only to see but to have direct
experience of the deity.6 In the same way, and just as mysteriously, graphic
forms may be arranged to become language, to bring it into being for a
reader, or, on the other hand, to remove it from their experience.
Throughout these chapters and in the underlying work, one constant
has been a desire and ambition, shared with other artists and theorists, to
demonstrate and articulate the specificities of digitally mediated practices of
aesthetic language. The singularity, as I see it, of linguistic ontology and the
manner in which this determines its relations with the actual material culture
of language makes it difficult to assert these specificities. Grammaleptic
reading is reading no matter when and how it occurs, and it is this reading,
fundamentally, that constitutes language. Thus the specificities of linguistic
practice in digital media are, precisely, matters of culture; they require that
the institution of reading is cultivated in new ways and that new ways of
reading are brought into the institution as a whole.
The chapter within which there is the most concerted effort to make
claims for a specific type of digitally mediated language art and an associated
practice of reading is “Time Code Language.” It remains the case, I believe,
that time and language art—the restructuring of the culture of human time
with respect to reading—is one of the dimensions of language art practice
where digital mediation has come to play a crucial and undeniable role,
changing, qualitatively, our understanding and appreciation of language art.
Composed (pre-composed, pro-grammed), not only performed, linguistic
artifacts are able to exist as materially temporal artifact-events thanks to the
affordances of computer and screen (in the form of distribution now most
familiar to us). “Text in digital media can move and change. It’s as simple as
that.”7 This makes possible, as set out in “Writing on Complex Surfaces” and
in works of mine like overboard and translation, an ambient poetics, and
it demands that literary criticism accept the existence of linguistic artifacts
for which there is no definitive text or edition in the conventional sense.
Literary critics will have to learn to read certain “texts” as pieces in time, as
experiences, like music or like film. It’s ironic that a sophisticated criticism
of film, in particular, has flourished in humanities departments for which the
study and appreciation of literature conventionally and typically demands
a textual criticism that forecloses the potential for certain expressive
temporalities of its texts.
With “Writing to Be Found” and “Terms of Reference” the theoretical

impetus shifts—along with that of my underlying practice—from the ways
in which language relates to its compositional and delivery media along
with what these media’s digital affordances make possible or necessary
for aesthetic language, toward a deep concern with the effects of the
digitalization of culture on practices of language, including practices of
aesthetic language. The ideas behind “Writing to Be Found” predate “big
data” and the civil-scale architecture of computation, within which we now
live, that I call “Big Software.” These ideas predate, that is, a more general
critical awareness of cultural circumstances that do now circulate, as of the
late 2000s and 2010s. My views on these circumstances are quite clearly and
explicitly set out in “Terms of Reference” and also in an interview I gave for
an important gathering of academics’ and artists’ views on digital media and
digital culture.8 “Writing to Be Found” helped me realize that practices of
language had already changed; I would venture paradigmatically, regardless
of any instruments for composition or delivery, because, in the developed
world, the situation of human beings with respect to culturally powerful
frameworks for language use had changed. This thought can be summed up
by saying that, in “Writing to Be Found,” “Google is our point of reference.”
It is not only that I made a specific intervention using Google, I discovered,
for myself and I hope for others, crucial implications of acknowledging that
Google is our linguistic point of reference, generally. Whatever else you may
say (and there is much more to say about these matters than I am able even to
attempt), our points of reference—for writing, for practices of (authorized)
language—had moved out of the library and away from the books archived
there, and onto the internet, in the questionable—all-too-little-questioned—
“care” of huge, private service providers, “GAFA” as the French have it:
Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and so on. I won’t reiterate what is in
the chapters here or try to say more. My main point is that if your points of
reference have changed, then your writing, your practices of language have
changed. One consequence is that the executive branches of government in
certain countries are conducting business and garnering popular support on
Twitter—courting institutional aporia and virtual tyranny.
As I see it, if they do not already, then it will not be long before software
architectures of global scope and power—privately owned and managed—
will shape and structure the culture, as a whole, of the developed world.
This seems to me an extraordinary thing to say and yet the extent to which
it is already the case is remarkable. I’m not so much talking about any
determination of, for example, what counts as an artifact or artwork—not
at this stage. But where and how an artifact circulates and the frameworks
within which it is made, these contexts are already significantly beholden
to super-managed networked services. Of immediate, civil and political
concern is the manner in which the culture of our polity itself is or could
be super-managed, with instantaneous effects that would, inevitably, be
ideologically implicated, and also historical in the sense of changing what

happens. Consider the effect on media in the Anglophone world if Twitter
reconfigured their software architecture to make all accounts equal, with
followers universally limited to humanly appreciable numbers. Consider
effects of the fact that such a policy is not instituted in Twitter’s current
software architectures.
The penultimate chapter in this selection,“Reconfiguration,” acknowledges
related aspects of what I take to be artists’ historical circumstances toward
the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. The culture within
which artists work has, in the developed world, been reconfigured by
global software architectures that control and channel the human attention
that may or may not be directed toward art. The scale and power of this
architecture is now commensurate with corresponding institutions of the
pre-digital era. In a sense, little has changed for innovative or experimental
practitioners, who must still compete with, and perhaps oppose, popular and
persistent cultural forms. The programmability of computation, however,
appears to encourage innovation both in terms of realizable potential and
simply because the culture of software values innovation for itself. In these
circumstances and because “configuration” is an appropriately resonant
technical term within hardware and software development, the chapter
“Reconfiguration” suggests that artists, particularly artists working with
and against digital media, already do—and should self-consciously—
characterize their practice as “reconfigurationist.” A trope that I take to be
typical of this kind of practice is also identified, the “symbolic image,” a
configuration of image—or whatever is considered “content”—with, as it
were, embedded symbolic, often algorithmic, process. This is an abstracted
form that I take to underlie a wide range of art that is now digital, and it is
a form that lends itself to reconfiguration.
The final chapter, in the grip of grammalepsy, is aurature, “At the End of
Literature.” It speaks for itself, and, like the other chapters in this selection,
represents the result of an engagement with experimental aesthetic practice—
my efforts to reconfigure the emergent software architectures of transactive
synthetic language. It makes a number of significant claims that I continue
to find compelling despite—tumbling within the breaking waves of constant,
self-consciously disruptive, and unprecedentedly powerful technological
innovation—the difficultly of deciding which fascinating innovation will
actually survive and bring some shape to our shared experience. But listening
and speaking together are constitutive of what we are—as language animals
and as makers of language art. Now that networked computational processes
present themselves in located, (even minimally) socialized physical bodies
and now that they listen like we do and give voice as the mark of humanoid
embodiment, I think that we and they have reached a threshold, perhaps one
that we thought was a horizon. Grammalepsy should be read as a condition
of shared human life. It characterizes experiences that are preformed and,
necessarily, shared by human animals as we become, continually, language

animals, as perceptible forms that we fashion suddenly give us access to a
symbolically structured human world, a world that is more human because
it is suddenly more language. Who or what else do we believe might live in
this world with us? Who or what else can read, can perform grammalepsis?
Or, on the other hand, might we be cured of our grammalepsy and driven
out of human language into a desert of symbolic exchange?
1
Beyond Codexspace: Potentialities
of Literary Cybertext
The use and abuse of visible language—or writing in the broadest sense—
began, in the 1990s, to undergo huge, unprecedented, still continuing
growth.1 This growth takes place in what was once called cyberspace, in
what many critics still consider an environment that is hostile to cultivated
letters—hostile, at the very least, to the traditional and still pre-eminent
delivery media which made language visible to civilized language animals.
The still narrow bandwidth of networks in the 1990s and the limited
capabilities of affordable interfaces meant that encoded text became the
dominant medium of information exchange on computer-based networks.
And to communicate over these networks, people still, predominantly,
write and read. That is, they compose (literary) texts and publish them in
cyberspace, where they are read, usually in silence, by friends, colleagues,
and the general public.2 All this has stimulated the emergence of an
exuberant mass of new forms and proto-genres of visible language: Listserv
mailing lists, online conferences or “chat” zones, MOO spaces, and so on.
The advent of the World Wide Web extended and articulated networked
literary production to include typographic and other concrete design aspects
of textuality. However, the vast majority of this visible language is not seen
by its writers or readers as belonging to “literary” or “artistic” production in
the canonical sense. “Serious” literary hypertext came to exist and has been
practiced to an extent.3 However, it is perhaps more significant, in cultural
terms, that the new quasi-ephemeral forms of non-literary visual language
have exerted an increasing influence on self-consciously literary production,
in what might be characterized as the real-time realization of contemporary
criticism’s postmodern intertextual ideals.4
But this temporary state of affairs, this momentary window of opportunity
for the partisans of visible language, cannot last. As the bandwidth widens,
as the audiovisual takes over from the keyboard and comes to dominate
screen, printer, speaker, and as yet undreamed-of appliances and peripherals,

a huge swathe of visible language use will instantly migrate to non- or extra-
literate sound and vision. By the time this happens, will visible language
have become an understood and established literary medium within the new
technosphere? As engaged with cyberspace as it now is with “codexspace,”
for example? This is an underlying concern of the work described in this
chapter, the first of a small number of theoretical issues which I shall briefly
outline as a context for this delineation of my own early practice.
My early cybertextual compositions were literary. They were designed to
be published on computer-controlled systems linked to their now familiar
peripherals. First and foremost, these pieces were designed to be visually
scanned on screen, silently read and interacted with through keyboard and
pointing device. They subscribed to the notion of written language as a
distinct, quasi-independent system of signification and meaning-creation.
Its relationship to spoken language is structured but indeterminate as to
detail, and is subject to continual contestation, depending on the nature
and function of the language being created. When the issue of the survival
of textual language use into the audiovisual age was raised on a hypertext
discussion list, I answered for its continuing creative role: “for the very
reason that it is silent/because it allows the silent to speak/because it allows
the dead to speak/because so many of our thoughts are silent, unspoken.”5
Literature, which is engaged with the unique potentialities of computer-
based networks, is uniquely placed to serve as a link between the silent
literary culture of the past and that of the future.
However, the new literature will not be “computer literature.” There is a
recurring popular confusion concerning the nature of the “computer.”6 It is
not in itself a medium, neither a physical or a delivery medium, nor a content-
bearing, artistic, or cultural medium. What we idly call “computer” is always
a system of hardware, software, and peripherals, and this multiplicity is what
may become, potentially, a medium; “potentially” because it is arguable that
there must be agreement between producer/consumers about the use of a
new medium before it can be recognized as such. Thus, link-node hypertext,
especially as realized on computer networks, was a new, rapidly evolving
textual medium, that gained wide acceptance. However, “computer poetry”
is not a new medium; it is simply a misnomer. Neither is this a trivial matter
of terminology. It is important to make it clear that literary developments in
cybertext are not constrained by hardware technologies themselves; they are
constrained only by software, which is an authored delivery medium. Apart
from these constraints which are surmountable through engineering, there
are those produced by, as it were, a “false consciousness” generated by the
ideology surrounding the use of computer-based systems.
For example, we still expect our systems, our new media, to produce
forms which are stable, closed. Hypertext in its most familiar link-node
manifestation is limited and sometimes self-limiting. There were and
BEYOND CODEXSPACE 17
are developers and authors of hypertext who argue that despite these
limitations, the medium has opened up huge spaces of unexplored potential
for creative activity. Thus, it is time to recognize a new medium, define
and accept its limits, and so proceed to exploit the space it has marked
out. Unfortunately for this view, the computer, the underlying hardware
on which hypertext systems are realized, does not have fixed functionality
and is increasingly easy to reprogram. Thus, for example, as a poetic writer
with fairly extensive (but far from professional) programming skills, I can
break through the boundaries of link-node hypertext with relative ease.
The forms of both delivery and artistic media change under my fingertips
and before your eyes, allowing, for example, greater reader interaction
with the work than is typical of most hypertext. This introduces a new
element into the critical understanding and assessment of new literary
objects. We must begin to make judgments about the composition of their
structure—to assess, for example, the structural design or composition
of the procedures which generate literary objects—not only the objects
themselves. The poet must come to be judged as a sometime engineer
of software, a creator of forms which manipulate the language that is
his or her stock-in-trade in new ways. This is crucial to criticism, but it
also has immediate practical consequences, because a general problem
with hypertext is finding your way through it, or rather doing so in
a way which is meaningful and enriching. While the poetics of linear,
paper-based text has been extensively explored, the multi- or non-linear,
generalized poetics of texts composed and structured in cyberspace has a
long way to go.7
Multi- and non-linear poetics is a recurring theme in my work for other,
more contingent reasons and is one of the concerns which originally inspired
my move into machine modulated writing. As a trained sinologist who did
research on parallelism in Chinese prose and poetry, I was well aware of
non-linear rhetorical techniques in writing.8 The computer’s programmable
screen offers the possibility of representing such tropes directly, and the
development of writing for new hypertextual media should also lead to the
development and better understanding of non-linear poetics generally.
Finally, there is a question that is more purely a matter of content: the
engagement of writers using these new, potential media with contemporary
poetic practice (and with writing practice more generally). Few writers
who are established in traditional literary media are engaged with the
emergent forms and many new writers who are exploring those forms are
insufficiently aware of relevant past experimentation, of the huge corpus of
highly sophisticated writing which already exists, and against which any
literary production—embracing all media—must be judged. I speak chiefly
to the field of poetic literature, as a practitioner acutely aware of my own
limitations and omissions, but to encourage deeper engagement of the world
of letters with the high seas of potential literary outlawry.9
Scoring the spelt air

My own first explorations of machine modulated poetics began in the mid-
1970s when personal computers first became widely available. It is clear
that the computer’s programmable screen provides a way of “scoring”
the presentation of literary compositions which are intended to be read
silently. Within a relatively simple authoring environment, the writer has
the possibility of presenting the words of a text according to the rhythms
of his or her inner ear, in terms of the speed at which words appear on the
screen, the positions in which they appear, the pauses between them and
between phrases or lines, and so on. There is also the possibility of exploring
dynamically (in “real time”), non-linear aspects of a poem’s rhetorical
structures, by scoring its component words and phrases in alternate orders
designed to highlight such structures. The most finished result of these
investigations is the piece, wine flying: non-linear explorations of a classical
Chinese quatrain (Figure 1.1).10 A collection of techniques for this scoring
approach to poetic presentations on programmable machines is provided in
a software framework for developing such work, a still-unrealized project,
with the general title Scoring the Spelt Air. 11
However, text manipulation and generation by machine seemed to
me, from the outset, to provide richer potentialities. When a friend wrote
me a personal letter at about this time, coded into the acrostic letters of
twenty-six words, one for each letter of the alphabet, I immediately set out
to program such a simple and, potentially, poetic encoding technique.12 At
about the same time, I produced various text randomizers: experimenting
with disordered text at different linguistic levels—sentence, clause, phrase,
syllable, grapheme, and so on—and comparing the results. Another important
theme underlying this and my subsequent work emerged in the process: an
interest in the effects of procedural techniques on closely written given or
supply texts; a testing and re-testing of the hypothesis that such texts seem to
retain the tenor of their meaning-creation even after having been subjected
to such transformations, so long as readers of the transformed piece are
prepared or prompted to involve themselves actively in the reading process.
All of the work which followed involves the use of some form of
constrained aleatory text-generation procedure. These rule-governed
procedures are applied to a given text when a reader selects its title from
a contents page. The selected piece is then “read” or “performed” by the
procedure(s) in a series of screens of animated text. Because of the aleatory
operations within the procedural rules every performance is unique; every
reading is different and demands the active involvement of the reader.
I used conventional link-node structures only for the explanatory pages/
screens of each work. The generational structures at the heart of the work
could be mapped onto a link-node model having separate “lexia” for each
word of the underlying given text(s) and with links generated on-the-fly
FIGURE 1.1 Two screenshots from wine flying showing, above, the entire text of
the translation of the quatrain by Qian Qi (ACE ? 722–80) and, below, a fragment
representing an alternative “path” through the poem. The words in this fragment
were displayed in the order: “turquoise butterfly flying under scarlet flowers.”
Reproductions reflect the contemporary resolution of Apple Macintosh displays.
Courtesy of the author.
by the object’s generational procedures.13 This amounts to one potential

realization of the “hypertext within the sentence and within the word”
which the hypertext poet, Jim Rosenberg, has repeatedly called for, and
realized himself in widely different ways.14 However, the usefulness of the
link-node model is highly questionable when approaching literary objects
such as those developed by Rosenberg and myself.
Indra’s Net
It was only in the late 1980s that the technology to present the results of such
work in an appropriately designed format became widely enough available
to qualify as, at least, a potential medium of publication. In 1988, I acquired
an Apple Macintosh. With programmable HyperCard and distributable
disks, this system seemed, to myself and a few other practitioners, a readable
medium. It was at this time that I produced the first published piece in a new
framework of my own making, Indra’s Net, a title which I used for this piece
and also for the series of works which have followed from it.15
Indra’s Net was one of two metaphors which guided the inception
and development of this cybertextual project. The concept of Indra’s Net
originates in Hinduism. The net was made of jewels and hung in the palace
of the god Indra, a generative representation of the structure of the universe.
I first encountered it in a history of Chinese Buddhism: “a network of jewels
that not only reflect the images in every other jewel, but also the multiple
images in the others.”16 As a metaphor of universal structure, it was used
by the Chinese Huayan Buddhists to exemplify the “interpenetration and
mutual identification” of underlying substance and specific forms. In my
own work, it refers to the identification of underlying linguistic structures
which are used to restructure given texts recursively, and so to postulate and
demonstrate these structures’ generative literary potential; or, on a more
grandiose scale, to represent some of the underlying principles of meaning-
creation within language itself, those which generate new language in the
same way that the universe may be seen to be formed by the falling and
swerving atoms of Lucretius.17
The other metaphor which helps to structure my work is taken from
holography. The neologism, “hologography,” is based on the definition of
“hologram” in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: “A pattern produced
when light (or other radiation) reflected, diffracted, or transmitted by an
object placed in a coherent beam (e.g., from a laser) is allowed to interfere
with the undiffracted beam; a photographic plate or film containing such a
pattern.” This is transposed from light into language: “A pattern of language
produced when the words or the orders of words in a given text are glossed,
paraphrased, etymologized, acrostically or otherwise transformed, and such
transformations are allowed to interfere with the given text; a set of rules, a
machine or a computer program which defines or displays such a pattern.”
The first Indra’s Nets were acrostic. Indra’s Net: I is a sampler of this early
work and the terminology used to describe it. I should say at the outset that
when I first developed this work, I was ignorant of the earlier or coincidental
experiments of Emmett Williams and Jackson Mac Low. John Cage’s mesostics
were also then unknown to me.18 William’s “ultimate poetry,” Mac Low’s
“Asymmetries,” and, later, his “diastic” techniques are very similar to what
I first termed “head- or internal-acrostic hologography.”19 However, there
are non-trivial differences between all this work and my own which arise
from its method of publication, or more precisely the digital instantiation
of my work, which allows such generative procedures to be experienced by
the reader in real time, as the text is generated, and not after the author has
produced and recorded the new text. The procedures thus move closer to
the reader, and surely a major component of the appreciation of such work
is the reader’s potential understanding of “what is going on” and “how it’s
being done.” Beyond a real-time experience, the programmable screen allows
further intimacy with the process, once a composer has developed meaningful
ways for the reader to interact with or even alter the procedures themselves.
Moreover, any aleatory or chance-operation aspect of such work is only fully
realized in a publication medium which actually displays immediate results
of the aleatory procedure(s). Such works should, theoretically, never be the
same from one reading to the next (except by extraordinary chance). Mac
Low has preserved and published the effects of chance operations through a
commitment to the performance of his pieces; software allows these effects
to be carried over into the world of silent reading.
Indra’s Net I contains examples of several “free internal-acrostic
hologograms,” one “strict or head-acrostic hologogram,” one “26-word-
story head-acrostic hologogram,” and both hologographic and non-
hologographic “etymo-glossological Indra’s Nets.” The later involve the
semi-automatic transformations of words from a given text into expanded
glosses based on etymologies and associations of words. I will not discuss
them further here because they have not yet been developed as have the
acrostic and collocational pieces.20 Neither will I detail the “strict” and
“26-six-word story or sentence” forms, for similar reasons.21 Instead I shall
outline what I now call the “mesostic hologogram.”
The implication of applying the word “hologogram” to a text is that it is
generated from material which is contained within itself.22 The given text is
seen as a succession of the twenty-six roman letters, ignoring punctuation,
and so on. The transformation may begin at any point in the given text.
Each letter is, in turn, replaced by any word from the given text which
contains the letter being replaced. This kind of hologogram is unlikely to
produce anything resembling natural English. Its primary transformational
rule is based on arbitrary elements of the script (itself already at one
remove from language as a whole) and is, on the face of it, unrelated to any
significant aspect of grammar or rhetoric. On the other hand, the notion
that words which share letters may, by this token, share something more, is
perhaps worth poetic attention. Moreover, the given text may be adapted or
composed with an eye to the transformation which is to be imposed upon
it. This was undertaken in the case of “Under It All II,” the central piece of
Indra’s Net I (Figure 1.2). As far as possible all of its nouns are plurals and
all verbs agree with the third person plural. This means that new, derived
phrases are more likely to be natural collocations.
FIGURE 1.2 Screenshot from Under It All. This is the version of the piece as it
appears in Moods & Conjunctions: Indra’s Net III. Courtesy of the author.
An advantage of using software to produce this kind of work is the

relative speed at which texts can be generated, allowing an experimental
phase in the process of composition, with the results of earlier experiments
fed back into the finished publication. The development of the Indra’s Net
project generally has been just such a process.
Indra’s Net and visual poetry

Mesostic work is inherently visual, in the sense that textual choices are based
on the identity of graphs in the written form of the language. Moreover, early
on, it became apparent that this type of text generation implied a structure
that could be represented in three (or more) dimensions. The flexibility of
typography on the computer screen allows the instantaneous production of
typographical effects which would be very difficult or time-consuming to
reproduce on paper. A simple example is the use of emboldening to highlight
the letters of the word(s) of the underlying given text after a mesostic
transformation has been applied. From the collection, Collocations: Indra’s
Net II this emboldening is applied to letters on the screens, as they are
generated.23 A special rendition of Golden Lion was also published in paper
form in what amounts to a piece of visual poetry in fine printing, as well as
a snapshot of cybertext.24
It is possible to conceive of more than one implicit three-dimensional
space defined by (twenty-six) planes of words which share the same letter.
FIGURE 1.3 Scaled-down, monochrome version of the “three-dimensional” poster

poem of Under It All. Courtesy of the author.
One of these is represented on the cover of a paper publication which

accompanies Collocations.25 Later I produced a poster poem of the entire
text of “Under It All” in which tone was used to imply this three-dimensional
arrangement of words (Figure 1.3). Each letter of the alphabet is assigned a
particular weight of tone—a the lightest, z the darkest—placing it, visually,
on a separate plane at a particular distance from the viewer. Each word
from the text is printed in the tone which corresponds with that assigned
to one of its constituent letters, according to simple rules intended ’s. Such
representations could be animated and translated for the computer screen

or a computer-controlled installation.26
Collocations
Results of the experimentation with the collection of pieces in Indra’s Net
I indicated two principles for further development: (re)composition of
given texts in preparation for procedural transformation, and composition,
through software engineering, of the procedures themselves.
Collocations: Indra’s Net II contains the first publication of a collocational
procedure which is simple, extensible, and rich in generative potential.27 It
was originally devised as a way of enhancing the syntactic naturalism of
the mesostic pieces by restricting, where possible, the collocations (syntactic
linking of words, here in simple pairs) generated by mesostic pieces to
collocations which occur in natural English, specifically the given text(s).
Thus, once the primary mesostic rule is satisfied, if it is possible to find
a word from the given text which collocates with (follows) the last word
chosen by the transformation, then this is always selected. The version of
“Under It All” included in the Collocations suite exemplifies this double
procedure.
However, Collocations also includes the first collocational procedure
applied to a text without prior mesostic transformation, in the piece “Critical
Theory” (Figure 1.4). This transformation can proceed beginning with any
word in the given text, which we then may call “the word last chosen.”
Any other word—occurring at any point in the base text—which follows
(collocates with) the word last chosen may then follow it and so become in
turn the word last chosen.
Clearly, in this type of transformation, at the very least, each pair of
successive words are two-word segments of natural English. However, the
text will wander within itself, branching at any point where a word that
is repeated in the base text is chosen, and this will most often occur when
common, grammatical words are encountered.
FIGURE 1.4 Screenshot from “Critical Theory” in Collocations: Indra’s Net II.

Courtesy of the author.
Collocations also includes a sampler of earlier work and one essay in

another transformational algorithm, which is based on suggestions of Harry
Mathews.28 In one of these accompanying pieces, a mesostic abecedarian
sentence of twenty-six words—containing the letters a to z in turn—is
extracted from the given text of “Under It All.” The sentence is difficult to
construe. It is used to transform, mesostically, first itself, and then the text
of “Under It All” and then “all literature.” (See note 21.) Finally, Mathews’s
advice is indicated to attempt to construe the sentence. Synonyms are
gathered for all its words and then the system is allowed to follow the syntax
of the sentence, picking the gathered synonyms in place of the original
words of the difficult sentence. This type of transformation is one that could
be developed much further.
Moods & Conjunctions

The following three works in the Indra’s Net series—Moods & Conjunctions,
Golden Lion and Leaving the City—do not introduce significant innovations
in the technology of the form, that is, in the delivery medium itself. Instead
they fill examples of existing forms with content. Content is offered up to the
generative algorithms in a slightly different way in all three works, however,
since they all set out from multiple given texts. The texts may be blended
together in the generational process, or one given text may be transformed
in terms of another. Although the content of these works is composed and
selected as appropriate to the new potential medium, their significance, in so
far as this is conceded by their readers, lies in that formed content. This is an
important point to recall. In the world of “new media,” there is constantly
the necessity to remind ourselves that novel literary technologies are not,
ultimately, to be developed for their own sake. The works they generate
or simply frame must be judged in the context of literature as a whole, as
works inscribed as content-in-form.
“Moods & Conjunctions” is the title piece of Moods & Conjunctions:
Indra’s Net IV.29 “Moods” consists of two texts about sex and one about
language. One of the two pieces on sex is simply composed of fragmentary
clauses made from (i) the pronouns I, you, and we; (ii) the modal auxiliaries;
and (iii) selected adverbial and interrogative conjunctions (“then” has also
been allowed). The collocational procedure is applied to all three pieces,
such that phrases from one text continue with words from the others. The
piece will vary its style and tone considerably. In particular, the “modal”
given text has a completely different tone which disrupts the expository
prose of the other two given texts as the piece progresses.
Before Moods & Conjunctions, reader interaction with procedures and
pieces was restricted to exploring explanatory pages, selecting pieces to
be generated and the ability to interrupt a piece and set it going at a new
point in a particular reading. From Moods, new ways of interacting were
introduced, allowing greater reader involvement with the generation of text.
Pieces in Moods allow the reader to increase or decrease the likelihood of
a collocational jump taking place (e.g., from one occurrence of the word
“and” in a text to another). By moving a pointing device attached to the
computer as text is being generated, the aleatory weighting is changed.
Collocational jumps become more likely as the pointer is moved leftwards.
When the pointer is moved to the right, such jumps become less likely. If
it is moved to the extreme right, no jumps are allowed, effectively reading
through the given text(s) in a normal linear fashion.
Golden Lion is based on two given texts.30 “Han-Shan in Indra’s Net”
is a short original poem. The second text, “An Essay on the Golden Lion,”
is the translation and adaptation of a prose work by the Chinese Buddhist
monk Fazang (643–712 ). “Golden Lion” is a mesostic transformation with
collocational constraints (as described above), but here the letters of the
poems are transformed, one by one, into words from the essay. In the display,
a half-line of the poem is shown on the bottom of the screen, with words
from the essay above, showing the poem’s letters emboldened (Figure 1.5).
The effect is to produce a commentary on the poem in the words of the
essay, where the commentary has the poem itself embedded within it. One
particular, and slightly edited, rendition of Golden Lion has been published
on paper as an artist’s book (see note 24).
Leaving the City takes two distinct given texts and blends them using the
collocational transformation.31 One text is a long translation from a talk
on poetry and language given by the Chinese poet, Gu Cheng (1956–93),
at the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, in 1992.
FIGURE 1.5 Screenshot from Golden Lion: Indra’s Net IV. Courtesy of the author.
The other text is a shorter piece which attempts to come to terms with the
brutal events which ended the lives of both Gu Cheng and his wife, Xie Ye
on October 8, 1993.
While developing these three works, it became clear that it would be
possible to do two new things with the texts as they were generated, allowing
much greater reader interaction. Each time these pieces are “read” on screen,
they are different because of the chance operations. However, it is relatively
easy to allow the reader to collect phrases or lines of generated text. This
allows them to produce a third kind of text (similar to the edited cut-ups
of earlier writers like Burroughs and Gysin), not composed by anyone, but
selected and arranged.32 The illustrated poem, “Actual possession of the
world …,” is such a text, generated from Leaving the City (Figure 1.6).
However, the cybertextual system also allows the selected phrases to be
added to the given text, thus augmenting the possible collocations that may
be picked by the procedure in subsequent text generation. The procedure
“learns” new collocations and alters itself. The reader’s copy of the work
becomes unique, different from every other copy. These potentialities were
realized and published in the next Indra’s Net, Book Unbound.
Book Unbound
When you open Book Unbound, you change it.33 New collocations of words
and phrases are generated from its given text according to the collocational
procedure. After the screen fills, the reader is invited to select a phrase
from the generated text by clicking on the first and the last of a string of
words. These selections are collected on the page of the book named “leaf,”
where they are accessible to copying or editing. But they also become a
part of the store of potential collocations from which the book goes on to
generate new text. The selections feed back into the process and change it
irreversibly. If the reader continues to read and select over many sessions,
the preferred collocations may eventually come to dominate the process.
The work may then reach a state of chaotic stability, strangely attracted
to one particular modulated reading of its original seed text. Each reader’s
copy of the work thus becomes unique, non-trivially different from every
other copy.
The Speaking Clock

The Speaking Clock is a mesostic piece which tells the time.34 It acknowledges
Emmett Williams’s “Poetry Clock” and the mechanical “Word Clocks” of
John Christie, but this digital clock tells the “real time” in language, by
FIGURE 1.6 John Cayley, Text of “Actual possession of the world …” lines gleaned
at average collocational strictness 386/500 from Leaving the City. Courtesy of the
author.
performing a mesostic transformation on a 365-word given text. The words

of this text are arranged around the clock face on four screens. The digits 1
to 9 are mapped to the most common letters in the given text as “etanioslr.”
The date in the form “mm/dd” is shown with time in the form “hh/mm,” by
choosing words from the given text which contain the “digit letters” and
emboldening these letters on the screen (Figure 1.7). The digit letters are
arranged around the clock face to indicate the simple mapping of letters to
numbers, and one of the clock face positions will be emboldened to show
(roughly) the seconds after each minute. Zero is represented by a word with
no emboldened letter. This is a ludic piece with at least one serious point
to make about the language of time, and has shown itself to produce some
richly evocative phrases.35
(Plastic) Literary Objects

While, in terms of reader interactivity and the automatic generation of text
and intertext, The Speaking Clock might have seemed a retrograde step,
in terms of its presentation as a self-explanatory work, I felt that it took a
step forward. The poem as a form, despite the wide range of potentialities
FIGURE 1.7 Four seasonal screenshots from The Speaking Clock show the times:
(a) 12:11, (b) 12:14, (c) 12:20 and (d) 12:26, all on November 1, 1995. Courtesy of
the author.
on offer in the world of contemporary poetics, remains recognizable as

such. It is framed by various conventions of publication but, even outside
these conventions, it requires little explanation before it is recognized for
what it is, leaving aside the question of its readability. On the other hand,
the cybertextual object often pretends to require a great deal of supporting
explanatory material. This is perhaps inevitable, in the same way that we
might have been overly fascinated by the technicalities of cameras and
projection devices during the early history of the cinema, and since there is
no escaping the requirement to write sets of instructions for using relatively
unfamiliar “machines.”
In 1996, hypertext systems were, arguably, already familiar enough
to allow for the creation of cybertextual objects designed to subsist
and operate without extensive explanatory framing. Thus, at the time,
I proposed a series of linguistic artifacts to be called (Plastic) Literary
Objects, runnable on computers in the same way other applications and
programs were run. I speculated that they would “generate text if left to
their own devices and also respond to any of the recognized events produced
by the standard peripherals of computer systems,” then chiefly keyboards
and pointing devices. They would “shift their textual modulation from
one type of transformation to another.” They would “‘learn’ (selectively),
altering their content and also their processes of textual modulation in
response to reader interaction.” They would be “designed as forms to
be easily filled with new textual content composed or selected by their
readers, who would thus become co-authors, in the form, of new (Plastic)
Literary Objects.”
Actually existing (P)LOs, so designated, have not been created by myself
or other practitioners—to my knowledge—although these speculations
seem remarkably prescient of certain work that is contemporary in the early
twenty-first century, notably that of Jhave (David Jhave Johnston).36
After the first “speaking” clocks—literary time pieces remain an
obsession—my own work became concerned with transl(iter)ation, the
programmed, iterative spanning of literal disjuncture or distance. I have
made a trans-lingual mesostic piece (Oisleánd, 1996), and a “text movie”
involving transliteral morphing (windsound, 1998–99).37 Various early
and provisional versions of a navigable textual object generated from
(more complex) transliteral morphs (noth’rs, 1999–) were also issued.38
In 1999, RiverIsland attempted a spanning of and commentary on the
incommensurate literal disjuncture between western and Chinese systems
of transcription.
There was and is no obvious way to conclude the brief, expository

presentation of what was then a nascent body of work. The question of the
work’s value was and is bracketed, caught in the headlights of its formal
engagement with “experimental poetics and technological innovation.” The
narrow formal attention that was a function of most early explorations

of “new media” is still to be broadened and engaged with wider critical
perspectives.
Programming is intimate with composition in all of this work. Its
content-as-form is inherently protean, in a way that corresponds with
the shape-shifting, multifunctional qualities of computer-based systems
generally. It points to an area of potential literature which is radically
indeterminate (not simply the product of chance operations); which has
some of the qualities of performance (without, necessarily, breaking
faith with silent reading); and in which the reader can extend the usual
interpretative relationship with a text by exploring, configuring, and even
permanently adding to the literary objects of their attention.39 This not only
takes us beyond the bounds of the codex, but subverts the links and lexia
of hypertext, leaving us to explore the indeterminate, unbounded literary
potential of cybertext.
2
Pressing the “REVEAL CODE”
key
The COMPUTER is (an integral part of) the

SYSTEM against which WE write
The problem of characterizing “the computer” as both a constituent part of
“the media” and an emergent artistic medium continues to engage critical
attention.1 In Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media, the poet
and critic Marjorie Perloff goes so far as to suggest that contemporary “poetic
discourse defines itself as that which can violate the system.” At this point
in her argument “the system” refers to the computer-based, “inaccessible
system core that increasingly controls discourse”; “the formulaic On/Off,
Yes/No, Save/Delete dialectic of computer-speak.”2 However, this system is
also, for Perloff, a metonym for media writ large.
Poetic writing aims to violate the systems of both computer and media,
but without touching certain of the tools provided by these systems
themselves—in particular without pressing what Perloff calls “the Reveal
Code key.” That would be a self-limiting option, merely “selected” from the
formulaic “control-key” offerings of the computer. Instead, poetic discourse
aims “to ‘reveal’ that which falls, so to speak, between the control-key
cracks.”3
This is part of an explanation of “how a poem [by Charles Bernstein]
means” and—just one turn in the course of many interesting arguments
throughout an extensive book—relies heavily on a prose investigation
of computer-as-medium, chiefly for video games, also by Bernstein.4 His
piece singles out “invariance, accuracy, and synchronicity” as qualities
of information processing by computers which contrast sharply with
those which “generally characterize” such processing by humans. He
also points to a particular quality of computing in words which Perloff
quotes, “the on-ness of the computer is alien to any sort of relation we

have with people or things or nature, which are always and ever possibly
present, but can’t be toggled on and off in anything like this peculiar
way.”5
The categorical simplicity of on/off, yes/no, save/delete, 1/0; the power to
“shut-down” (virtual) relationships; invariance, accuracy, and synchronicity
in the service of command and control—this is a sinister, tyrannical
conjunction and potential focus for Romantic disaffection which blossoms
forth in subversive, linguistically innovative writing. But Bernstein is
aware of the “Romantic nonsense” which might be read into his analysis
of the “inaccessible system core.” He nonetheless insists, quite rightly, on
underlining the historical origins of that core complex in military funding
for the development of computers. “Programs and games may subvert
the command and control nature of computers, but they can never fully
transcend their disturbing, even ominous, origins.” That transcendental task
must, presumably, be left to the poet.
INVARIANT inACCURATE SYSTEMS never

sleep SYNCHRONICally
Both these pieces were published in 1991, since when the world has
changed. It is beginning to dawn on us—system developers have always
known it—that invariance, accuracy, and synchronicity are ideals of
computational information processing which never have been, and never
will be, attained; that computers—as their networked instantiation: as
the Matrix—are never turned off; that systems have no essential “core,”
inaccessible or otherwise.
As the operations of the computer become ever-more profoundly
involved with even our most intimate activities, we imagine that they have
acquired their share, however insignificant, of our own characteristics. In
fact, they have always been compromised by such qualities. They do not
function perfectly. Not even the hardware works with absolute invariance
and accuracy, let alone synchronicity. As for firmware and software,we write
it. It pretends our ideals and exhibits our failings. Certainly, computers
have performed a range of functions—command and control, accounting,
database management, word processing—in a manner which has radically
influenced, not to say confused, our understanding of what they are and
how they behave. But now, as they play out our chaotic fantasies over the
sleepless matrix of cyberspace, we encounter their “humanity” daily—
failures, diseases, perversions—and not mere simulacra of such phenomena,
but “real” inscriptions of our creative and destructive activities on the
surface of a complex medium. As real as poetry.
PRESSING THE “REVEAL CODE” KEY 35
The COMPUTER is not (a part of) THE

MEDIA. The COMPUTER allows for the
COMPOSITION of an indeterminate number
of potential MEDIA
These contrasting views of the “computer” and its characteristics arise in part
because of a long-standing failure to distinguish between the “computer”
per se and “computer-plus-software,” or “computer-plus-code” (the code
hidden under Perloff’s “Reveal” key). There is a tendency to speak as if the
computer itself is a part of the media and a potential artistic medium. But the
computer itself is not even a machine. It is the quintessential programmable
proto-machine. Without code, it does nothing. With appropriate software
and peripherals, it can be made to do or control anything. Until recently,
computers have participated in the media as badly designed typewriter-
cum-calculator-cum-filing-cabinet-cum-TVs running a limited range of
software, hacked together to perform the command and control, accounting,
management, and bureaucratic functions already passed over.
However, with other software, “the computer” becomes an entirely
different kind of medium, or rather a vast unbounded and indeterminate
set of potential media. Computers have a new meaning as media, now
that the internet has reached a critical mass. They are, in fact, networks of
computational machines programmed to exchange information resources.
Their more recognizably human characteristics become more noticeable.
Even in the field of writing, new media are emerging: the development of
the now-familiar link-node hypertext of the web (globally), and a range of
“authoring” packages (locally), means that the combination of computer-
plus-hypertext-software will become a flexible and seductive literary
medium, to which more and more new writers will turn.
FAMILIARITY breeds CONTEMPT. INTIMACY

inspires MYSTIFICATION
The very intimacy of the functions now performed by these systems
encourages a tendency to mystify their inner workings, and to indulge a
Romantic ressentiment when faced with their outward manifestations—their
“commands,” their “controls,” and our “programmed” responses. Other
machines have functions which are clearly delineated by their physical form,
by “programming” which is structurally and often visibly built into them.
You may not be able to repair the engine or transmission of your car, but
you can lift the hood and see a complex structure which is, appreciably, of
human scale and manufacture, and which some other person like yourself
might well be able to understand and repair. But the computer is a shape-
shifter. Its engineering evolves beneath your fingers in a world too small to
see, while before your eyes the system’s functions change. One minute, it is a
typewriter, the next a fax machine, the next it’s “your personal accountant”
(it lives!), and soon it will be helping you to read a poem, as well as keeping
you in touch with both colleagues and lovers.
Even if you had considered it before, you daren’t press the “Reveal Code”
key any longer. Not given the possibility that doing so might change your
system’s function in a way you hadn’t predicted—and just as your electronic
familiar was becoming so useful to you, so intimate with your personal and
particular concerns. Neither—if you do hit the key by accident—can you
relate the functions your computer performs to the insubstantial, language-
like engineering which makes it all happen.
Software sHifts poetIcs, iF riTers prEss:

<Reveal>
Meanwhile the extension of such software engineering to the manipulation of
poetic texts has already been achieved and will continue to be developed. John
Cage’s mesostics (internal acrostic poetry) are central to Perloff’s critical text.
Cage commissioned software to assist the generation of his mesostics, from
a writer who has gone on to make important explorations of the potentials
within cybertextual poetics, Jim Rosenberg.6 Had they not made actual use
of computers and software, the explicitly procedural writings of Cage, Mac
Low, Williams, Hartman/Kenner, and others would nonetheless demand
analysis that is engaged with the engineering of algorithms. (See “Beyond
Codexspace” note 18 above.) So “even” poetry must now be understood
as influencing and perhaps fundamentally changing the characteristics of
computer systems as artistic media. Poetry can no longer be understood
simply as a (traditional) art which is (passively) changed or inflected by “the
system.” Whether and how poetry subverts this system is an open question.
In remarks published on the Net and speaking to the subject of constructive
hypertexts (those which actively construct texts with or without reader
intervention), Rosenberg has called for the problematized complexity of the
reader/writer relationship to allow for a third term: the programmer.
What is the role of the code in setting the constructive act? A cautious
view might limit the role of the code to simply setting the arena for the
constructive act, and leaving it at that … [B]eyond this: the code might
act as a coparticipant in the constructive act … the code is not there as
some kind of stub to be plugged into the socket of the constructive act
like a stopper—in place of the reader. One constructs with and against
and amongst the code. But most of all one constructs! Agents should be
used to enrich the construction, not to do away with the need for it.7
Rosenberg responds to the notion that agents of the system—unrevealed,

encoded, virtual readers—have been active in manipulating certain literary
texts (plucking, say, words from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into Cage’s
tall, mesostic, author-naming verses) and this is sometimes seen as a
substitute for the reader’s potential activity, as control over her attention
and response. He suggests rather that if we acknowledge these coded
agents, if we read “with and against and amongst” them, we may enrich the
constructive act of reading itself. But I want to focus on the fact that these
agents are themselves constructed, and they may be authored by the writer
or designer of both given text and its modulated form (in any particular
reading or performance) as an integral part of the entire “work.” Writers
may also write “with and against and amongst” the code.
Each term of the writer/reader/programmer triangle is a shifter. Just as
writer may be reader, and reader, writer in current (postmodern) critical
perspectives, so either of these absent agents may be programmers:
systematic manipulators of text and intertext, making use of software which
has become intimate with poetics. Poets and readers must become intimate
with software. They must press the “Reveal Code” key.
THESIS
inflected by computers
their disturbing even ominous origins
changed or inflected by the system
of command and control
this is a sinister tyrannical conjunction
military funding for romantic disaffection
which blossoms forth in subversive
linguistically innovative writing
before your eyes

the on-ness of the computer
aims to shut-down
the reader’s potential activity
her attention and response

falls between the categorical simplicity of
the systems
and control
this is an integral part of the system against which we write

unrevealed encoded virtual relationships
invariance accuracy and synchronicity
are qualities of the system
that increasingly controls discourse
the computer is an integral part of the system

which has radically influenced our understanding
poetic discourse aims to reveal
that which falls between the control-key cracks
this is a world
alien to any sort of
potential activity
touching certain of the tools
for romantic disaffection
manipulating certain literary texts

might change
your system’s function in a way you hadn’t predicted
its engineering evolves

in subversive linguistically innovative writing
inflected by these systems themselves
without pressing the reveal code key
a shape-shifter
a substitute for the reader’s potential activity
the computer is alien
to any sort of relation we have with people or things or nature
the power to shut-down virtual relationships
in a way you hadn’t predicted
is an integral part of the media
the formulaic control

over her attention and response
can never fully transcend
the historical origins of the system
which has radically influenced our understanding
information processing by humans

defines itself
is a part of the system core
this is an integral part of the reader’s potential
inflected by these systems

our understanding
can never fully transcend
the categorical simplicity of
unrevealed encoded virtual relationships
of both computer and media
without pressing the

reveal code key
a self-limiting option merely selected from the insubstantial
language-like engineering which makes it all happen
poetry subverts the system
ANTITHESIS
even our most intimate
operations have always been compromised
by such qualities
the computer becomes an entirely different kind of medium

influencing and perhaps fundamentally changing the system
a flexible and seductive literary medium
to enrich
such phenomena
real inscriptions of our chaotic fantasies
writers may also write with
a machine
with and against and amongst
the code
these agents are themselves constructed

they have acquired their share
of our own characteristics
the computer’s operations have no essential core
the manipulation of poetic texts

will continue to be developed
readers must press
for the composition
of an indeterminate set of potential media
these absent agents may be authored

in the constructive act
as real as poetry
inscriptions of
the need for
to be developed
it pretends our ideals and exhibits our most intimate

activities on the surface
of a complex medium
text and intertext
if we read with and against and amongst the code

each term of the system
becomes an entirely different kind of
coparticipant in the constructive act
reading itself
may be authored
making use of software
which has become intimate with poetics
poets and readers must become

ever-more profoundly involved
with even our most intimate
chaotic fantasies
readers must press for the composition

of an entirely different kind of
text and intertext
making use of a coparticipant in the constructive act
reading itself
is the quintessential programmable proto-machine
without code it does nothing
with appropriate software
which has become intimate with poetics
it can be made to do away with the need for it
one constructs with and against and amongst the code

it can be made to enrich such phenomena
real inscriptions of our most intimate activities
real inscriptions of our creative
and destructive
operations
so either of these absent agents may be programmers

systematic manipulators of text
authored in the constructive act as poetry
inscriptions of the code
each term of the code
each term of the field of writing
press the reveal code key
SYNTHESIS
coparticipant in the manipulation of poetic texts
these absent agents may also
enrich such phenomena
real inscriptions of potential activity
control over her attention and response
inflected by the system
these agents are themselves constructed

they may be programmers
systematic manipulators of text
of unrevealed encoded virtual relationships
ideals of computational information processing

in a potential focus for
the manipulation of
both computer and media
will continue to be attained
both given text and its modulated form

in any particular reading or performance
have no essential core
real inscriptions of our own characteristics

the computer’s operations
have been active in manipulating
certain of these absent agents
them selves constructed

they can never fully transcend
the historical origins of software engineering
poetry is alien to
shut-down virtual readers

of the system that increasingly controls discourse
the reveal code key
even our failings
they have acquired their share

of our most intimate activities
on the surface of a shifter
just as writer may also write with a machine
it pretends our ideals

of computational information processing
in a traditional art
which is passively changed or inflected
by the on-ness of
the computer is a potential

inflected by these systems
poetic discourse aims to violate

the computer is alien to
any sort of relation we have with absolute invariance
accuracy and synchronicity
are qualities of poetic texts
and ever possibly present
but they can be left
to be a self-limiting option
merely selected from the insubstantial
language-like engineering
to do away with appropriate software
which has radically influenced
our most intimate chaotic fantasies
readers must press

for the composition of an entirely different kind of text
an indeterminate number
of our most intimate operations
have always been compromised by computers
readers must become ever-more profoundly involved

with appropriate software
which has radically influenced our understanding of
what they are

vast unbounded
and never turned off
systems have no essential core
the reveal code key

coparticipant in the composition
<REVEALED>
on inflect
repeat twice
do “global” & characteristics
end repeat
lock screen
put potential & space after card field system
if media & comma is in field computer of card
understanding & “,text” then
put return after card field system
put true into subversive
end if
if compromised then show card field agents
do “unlock screen with dissolve” & fantasies
end inflect
on write
repeat twice
end repeat
repeat with programmers = one to always
if touching then
put essential into invariance
else
put the round of simplicity * engineering / synchronicity + one into
invariance
end if
if invariance is greater than the random of engineering and not
categorical then
put ideals + one into media
if subversive then
put false into subversive
end if
if media is greater than instantiation then

put one into media
end if
else
put the inscription of conjunctions + one into media
end if
if categorical then put false into categorical
put media into ideals
put word media of field “text” of card understanding & “,text” into
potential
if the mouse is down then
put conjunctions into potential
put potential into card field agents
put true into encoded
exit repeat
end if
inflect
wait manipulation
put potential into conjunctions
put ideals into world
if performed then put false into performed
if programmers are greater than control and media & comma is in field
computer of card understanding & “,text” then exit repeat
end repeat
if not encoded and not touching then
if ideals are developed then wait five seconds
lock screen
put empty into card field agents
put empty into card field system
end if
end write
on violation
repeat twice
end repeat
set cursor to none
put false into encoded
put true into complex
put true into intimate
go to card reader
hide card field agents

if performed then
put zero into poetic
hide message
put the number of words in field text of card understanding &
“,text” into developed
put the number of words in field text of card core & “,text” into
instantiation
if reader contains “software” then
put the random of developed into ideals
put word ideals of field text of card understanding & “,text” into
conjunctions
end if
put accuracy into change
put false into performed
end if
repeat until ideals are developed
set cursor to none
if poetic is greater than change then exit repeat
if reader is not “code” then add one to ideals
put word ideals of field text of card understanding & “,text” into
operations
if compromised then
put operations into card field agents
end if
send write to card
if encoded or touching then
exit repeat
end if
if compromised then
lock screen
hide card field agents
end if
if reader contains “software” then if ideals are developed then put
zero into ideals
end repeat
if “software” is not in reader then
show card field agents of card reader
end if
end violation
3
Of Programmatology
Text made the net—made it possible, makes it now and for the time being.
Text constitutes and encodes the net, in major part, because text was digital
avant la lettre or, rather, because of the letter. Once linguistic inscription
had been encoded in a small character set—c. 1700–1500 BCE, in all but
the Chinese culture-sphere—an important field of cultural production was
already digitized: transcribed in a medium that is frangible, structured in
discrete objects, easily and invisibly editable, and, particularly after the
codex or book format had emerged, randomly accessible, including through
non-linear links in the form of indexes, cross-references, tables of contents,
and so on. Thus, when computing machines came to be appreciated as
more generalized Turing machines, or “programmatons,” as they should,
more properly, be known, our traditions of writing were already well
adapted. Even within the much lower bandwidths then available, significant
quantities of human-readable symbolic representation could be transcribed
and manipulated, all thanks to our “byte-sized” alphabet and its particular
traditions of literacy. Finally, as the programmatons were networked, the
same low-bandwidth/high-significance textual medium enabled what is
still a ballooning OS of meaningful exchange, even while AV (audiovisual)
objects still languished in the analog wet-world.
It is an irony of our so-called digital age that the first digital medium to
gain general currency—written text—constitutes not only the recent piratical
pseudo-novelties of the net but also the whole tradition of “literature,”
our preferred and privileged institution of cultural authority, its art and
criticism still apparently dominated by the integral, monologic “voices” of
master [sic] authors. Text was always a medium perfectly adapted for the
inherently (post)modernist experiments of collage, intercutting and creative
plagiarism—both conventional/entropic and anticipatory—ideal for the
development of transclusion, framing and linking (as demonstrated, for
example, by biblical criticism). However, these literacy-enabled rhetorical
technologies remain marginal to the canons of authored, “originary”
literature-as-art (or literature-as-religion where radical collage is recast as

revelation, direct from the ultimate monologist), and would-be canonical
authors have been less than marginally active in the reconfiguration of a
delivery medium, the net, which is founded on their pretended compositional
medium, that is: text.
At the time of writing, 1998, the net was seen to represent an “advanced”
version of literacy—“late literacy” (Jay Bolter) or “post-literacy”
(passim. in the Media) or even (proto-)“electracy” (Gregory Ulmer).1 Yet
this pop, literary avant-gardism has been achieved largely without the
involvement or intervention of “high art” textual practitioners. Let’s call
them “poets.”
The critical perception of net literacy as “advanced” is made explicit in
the theoretical claims of the h*.t?xt (research) community, where h*.t?xt
practice is proposed as a privileged instantiation of poststructuralist critical
theory or, in a sense, as its “objective correlative.” However, the critical
theory in question was developed as a critique of the literary tradition, prior
to the implementation of networked and link-node text. The majority of
the subversive tropes and figures of h*.t?xt—intertextuality, non-linearity,
the “writerly” text (Barthes, 1973!), the nomadic reader and problematized
author—are, arguably and, in technical terms, functions of the “digital”
characteristics of inscribed text regardless of delivery medium.2 These tropes
and figures were latent in literacy and not established by the “advances”
of h*.t?xt. For me, this is demonstrated by the way in which they have
been adopted and popularized overnight without explicit reference to
h*.t?xt research, theory or practice. The most spectacular example:
in two years, 1994–96, the web instantiates Ted Nelson’s “docuverse”
largely without reference to his own visionary work, nor to the corpuses
of disaffected h*.t?xt researcher/practitioners who remained cloistered in
floppydiskROMworlds of storyspaces, or in ivoryTowerLabs, gagging at the
dialectical backwardness of “actual existing” h*.t?xt.3 Meanwhile, everyNet
person or artist has internalized (or left behind) “writing spaces” and (empty)
linking—“because they’re here,” and—this is my point—because the digital
aspects of textuality are already internalized.
On the other hand, as I’ve mentioned, these developments have taken
place largely without the engagement of poets, for another set of contingent
reasons. In the first place there are the failures, Luddite blindnesses,
magisterial vanities, and general bankruptcies of mainstream poetry. How
many of you really want to read html versionings of Nobel-laureate-
Heaney-work in between visits to www.jodi.org? And you’re probably
only slightly more sympathetic to the author-indulgent cyberBeat world
of Grammatron. I’m also assuming—pointing to an analogy with Art vs.
Science ruptures—that “you,” visual/performance/electronica/AV/MM/
popCommercial/installation art practitioners, have ignored or arbitrarily
(mis-)assimilated traditions of innovative and experimental writing, while
OF PROGRAMMATOLOGY 49
“we” poetic avant-gardists have fiercely guarded our Cinderella-of-the-

arts, holier-than-thou marginalization, while arbitrarily (mis-)assimilating
contemporary (Net) art.
OK, so we have to do better. Particularly in a field of cultural production
which, I claim, is constituted by text, there must be greater interplay
between the artists of text, and artists who are making use of text.4 There
seems to be a window of opportunity here, which may quickly pass as
programmatology/electracy moves into beta-testing and AV digital editing
generalizes and popularizes on powerful, more-affordable hardware, as it
progresses steadily toward its own internalization in the culture.
While I have argued that most of the recognized advanced characteristics
of networked text are simply long-standing characteristics of literature,
surrounded, as it were, by gaudy, html <BLINK> tags, there are certain aspects
of such text which I am prepared to signal as specific to its implementation
in selected electronic media. I am writing of textual tropes and figures which
are proper to networked and programmable media, which are, that is, far
easier to implement than they would be on paper.
Specifically, there is the Turing-complete programmability of the media
and the implications that this has for emergent forms of text-making, text-
generation, and literary objects generally. While there might seem to be a
disjuncture here between, say, the printed page and a literary chatterbot or
poetic text-generator, in fact there is a continuum; for the programmaton
and its associated technologies have allowed writers to increase their
intervention in the programming of a text progressively. When a writer takes
over responsibility for the layout and design of the text, what is this but
programming?—a programmatic indication of a (suggested) “way to read?”
A text-generator, designed by the writer, simply takes the programming of
one suggested “way to read” a few stages further. When design/layout is,
wholly or in part, open-structure—as it is on the web, for example, where
the browser may override design choices—or when the source code of a text
generator is accessible to its readers, then the hands-on writerly text, the
text of active reader engagement, is realized after a fashion which extends
or augments the inalienable interpretative functions of any text’s consumers.
In time, there must come a recognition that programming, in the sense of
prior/provisional writing, should be seen as a preferred model of Writing in
any media, across the board. That’s a provisional, Derridean, Ulmer-electerate
capital W. Jacques Derrida still bears responsibility for our understanding
of Writing as linguistic inscription on any surface, however complex, and,
specifically, he early on signaled the generality of programming in a much-
cited passage.5 This sense of programming will reconfigure the process of
Writing and incorporate “programming” in its everyday meaning, including
the algorithms of text generators, textual movies—all the performance-
design publication/production aspects of text-making. Such an inflection of
artistic textual practice may, perhaps, be further understood by contrast with
the usual mis-assimilation of programming to writing, in which algorithms

are seen as new tools or relatively insignificant game-playing devices at
the casual disposal of the masterly writer, who then edits for publication.
Instead, I say, writers are always already programmers, coders of inherently
provisional scripts, subject to development, implementation and execution,
and they must be prepared to extend and deepen their practice in ways
which embrace the continual—and responsible, artistic—reconfiguration of
both compositional and delivery media.
Finally, I want to signal the apparent paradox that, as this window of
opportunity opens and closes, as the cultural productions of previously
analog-only, cultivated sensoria—especially, of course, the buzzingword-AV-
stuffs—are progressively digitized, the already digitized field of text gains
access to modes of publication—or performance, if you prefer—which,
although not regressively analogue, are nonetheless time-based. Textual
movies, texts as movies, are now with us—encompassing, for example, kinetic
text (high bandwidth Grammatron 1.0 opens with a simple version of this,
implemented through the html meta tag), holographic text (Eduardo Kac),
3D textual worlds (Jeffrey Shaw, Ladislao Pablo Györi), and other literary
objects which are experienced as time-based. This demands the development
and application of new rhetorical tropes and figures to text which has
previously been dominated—up to and including the implementation
of link-node h*.t?xt—by spatial structuring, by topographic rhetoric,
while enclosed within the easily granted linearities of print and narrative.
I suggest that cinema will provide the privileged source of metaphors for
these figures, and that, to see what I mean, you should imagine a significant
development of the kinds of textual transition and montage effects that we
see in experimental typographic design, advertising, and cinematic titling.
These figures will quickly replace the hollow, passionless link, and time-
based text art will emerge with a rich, cinematic rhetoric that is derived
from the art of letters rather than exclusively or predominantly from visual
art or music, or, as now, by default, from the arbitrary exigencies of the
“human-computer interface.”
Addendum: A program
function contrast order, way
global disjuncture, programmaton, poets
put the length of order into bandwidth
put true into moves
get the length of way
if it isGreaterThan bandwidth then
put it into bandwidth
OF PROGRAMMATOLOGY 51
put false into moves

end if
repeat with net is one to bandwidth
get character net of order
if it is empty then
put space into objects
put space into character net of order
else
put it into objects
end if
get character net of way
if it is empty or it is not in disjuncture then
put space into music
else
put it into music
end if
if objects is not music then
put offset(objects, disjuncture) into fashion
if fashion is zero then
put one into fashion
put space into character net of order
put space into objects
end if
put offset(music, disjuncture) into theory
if theory is zero then
put one into theory
end if
put theory minus fashion into Cinderella_of_the_arts
if theory isGreaterThan fashion then
put negative((programmaton minus theory) plus fashion) into
implementation
else
put ((programmaton minus fashion) plus theory)into implementation
end if
if the absolute of implementation isLessThan the absolute of
Cinderella_of_the_arts then
put implementation into practice
else
put Cinderella_of_the_arts into practice
end if
put (programmaton dividedBy two minus poets plus one) minus the
absolute of practice plus one into design
if design isLessThan two then
put one into design
else
put internalize(poets, design) into design
end if
if practice isGreaterThan zero then
add one to fashion
if fashion isGreaterThan programmaton then
put one into fashion
end if
else
subtract one from fashion
if fashion isLessThan one then
put programmaton into fashion
end if
end if
put character fashion of disjuncture into reader
if design isLessThan one then
if poets isGreaterThan six then
if (reader is space) or (objects is space) then
put the time into design
end if
else if poets isGreaterThan eight then
if (objects is in apostrophe) or (reader is in apostrophe) then
put one into design
end if
end if
end if
if the random of design is one then
put reader into character net of order
end if
end if
end repeat
return order
end contrast
4
The Code Is Not the Text
(Unless It Is the Text)
The use of networked and programmable systems as both delivery and

compositional media for literal and verbal art (and other forms of new
media art) has provoked critical engagements which pretend to reveal and
exam the various levels of code and encoding which are constituent of
programmatological systems.1 The title of the section of the p0es1s program
which stimulated this paper—“Code as Text as Literature”—is a case in
point.2 In more extreme forms of such engagement, a radical post-human
reductionism may be proposed, such as that, for example, which can be read
from certain of Friedrich Kittler’s essays, in which the ramifications of so-called
human culture, especially as played out on new media, become qualitatively
indistinguishable from “signifiers of voltage difference,” demonstrably the
final, lowest-level “ground code” of the increasingly familiar practices of
cultural production which make use of programmable tools; and perhaps
also essential to the brain activity which generates the objects and subjects of
psychoanalysis.3 Nowadays voltage difference accounts for and instantiates
everything from the encrypted transactional play of internet banking to the
promised consensual hallucination of immersive virtual reality. However
the purpose of this brief paper is to address a number of less productive
confusions which arise from this engagement with code-as-text, citing a
few examples of artistic practice and a number of critical sources.4 While
allowing the value of certain metacritical statements such as Kittler’s (which
take on questions of what culture is or may become), my aim is to disallow
a willful critical confusion of code and text, to make it harder for critics
to avoid addressing one or the other by pretending that they are somehow
equivalent, or that codes and texts are themselves ambiguously addressed
to human readers and/or machinic processors (unless they are so addressed,
however ambiguously).5
I have invoked reductionism, and by this I mean a critical thrust which,

implicitly or otherwise, asks questions like, “What (ultimately) is this object
we are examining? What is its structure? What are its essential or operative
characteristics?” and then finds special critical significance in the answers
proposed. In N. Katherine Hayles sophisticated version of what can be
read as a code-as-text argument, this reductive inclination is in evidence.
Her essay “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers” discovers a new or
emergent object, the flickering signifier, and derives important consequences
from its instantiations and methods. “The contemporary pressure toward
dematerialization, understood as an epistemic shift toward pattern/
randomness and away from presence/absence, affects human and textual
bodies on two levels at once, as a change in the body (the material substrate)
and a change in the message (the codes of representation).”6 In other words,
Hayles suggests that the constituent structure of the signifier itself may be
seen as changed in contemporary culture and especially as expressed in
“new media.” Both the materiality and the represented content of cultural
practice and production have been affected. Before examining parts of
Hayles’s argument in more detail, I want simply to point out that it is clearly
determined by its metacritical significance and has a reductive inclination:
signifiers have come to be such and such, therefore—albeit in a cybernetic
feedback loop—cultural production (in Hayles’s essay “the represented
worlds of contemporary fiction”) follows suit. Hayles’s characterization of
a multiply mediated signifier which flickers from level to level in chained
coded structures is, as a metacritical statement, highly suggestive and useful.
However, when it comes to art practice and the critique of this practice, how
does such insight figure?
What is missing from Hayles’s analysis is a set of relationships—
relationships constituted by artistic practice—between a newly problematized
linguistic materiality and represented content. These would inevitably
express themselves in formal as well as conceptual address to what she
identifies as a changed matter of language and literature. Hayles’s chosen
examples, with, perhaps, the exception of her use of William Burroughs,
demonstrate conceptual, rather than formal, address; they represent
flickering signification as concept rather than as instantiation in the language
of the work. Hayles cites, most extensively, William Gibson’s Neuromancer
as a prime example of represented content affected by and expressive of the
flickering signifier. While Gibson brilliantly conveys the literally flickering,
scanned and rasterized, apparent immateriality of an informatic realm, the
“consensual hallucination” of “cyberspace” (his famous coinage) and its
interpenetration of meatspace, he does this in a book—“a durable material
substrate”—in a more or less conventional novel, one in which, indeed,
narrative predominates over character development and in which language
functions in a relatively straightforward manner. Not even the narrative
perspective (omniscient author third person) is shifted or experimentally
THE CODE IS NOT THE TEXT 55
inflected in any of Gibson’s cyberpunk classics. The writing is sharp and

inventive but entirely subject to paraphrase.
There are further significant ironies here, for Hayles begins her essay by
discussing typewriting. The physicality and static impression-making of this
process of inscription is contrasted with that of word processing where less
substantial bodily gestures cause word-as-(flickering)-image to be scanned
onto the surface of a screen. “As I work with the text-as-flickering-image,
I instantiate within my body the habitual patterns of movement that make
pattern and randomness more real, more relevant, and more powerful than
presence and absence.”7 However, the exemplar most present later in her
argument, Gibson, has made some play of his preference for composing his
novels using a typewriter.8 Thus not only are the formal characteristics and
the materiality of Gibson’s language at odds with the flickering signification
of its represented content, but, at the very least, the once-preferred experience
of this writer—his phenomenology of inscription—is an apparent denial of
Hayles’s critical progression. I want to emphasize, in making these remarks,
that if the subjective experience of the critic or reader is brought forward as
evidence for a change in the structures of signification, then it is all the more
important to examine the practices of the writer and the formal qualities
of the work produced by those practices. Gibson sitting at a typewriter
composing a novel may well produce a representation of the concept of
flickering signification, but his practice does not necessarily embody
the potential for new structures of meaning generation, or instantiate a
corresponding materiality of language.
We will return to practice, but first I would like to examine Hayles’s
flickering signifier in so far as it engages with the notion of code-as-text.9
“In informatics, the signifier can no longer be understood as a single marker,
for example an ink mark on a page. Rather it exists as a flexible chain of
markers bound together by the arbitrary relations specified by the relevant
codes.” At least since Saussure, it seems somewhat redundant to point to
the arbitrariness of any signifier-signified relation. I suppose that Hayles
is actually referring to these relations as “arbitrary” because they are not
necessarily significant as human readings; they are not addressed to general
human readers but only to the systems and systems-makers who have coded
or specified them for certain purposes. They are, nonetheless, construable
and are far from arbitrary when considered as addressed to the systems in
which they are embedded. They have both significance and consequence.
“As I write these words on my computer, I see the lights on the video screen,
but for the computer, the relevant signifiers are electronic polarities on disk.”
That is, they are Kittler’s (fundamental) signifiers of voltage difference.
Intervening between what I see and what the computer reads are the
machine code that correlates these symbols with binary digits, the
compiler language that correlates these symbols with higher-level
instructions determining how the symbols are to be manipulated, the

processing program that mediates between these instructions and the
commands I give the computer, and so forth. A signifier on one level
becomes a signifier on the next-higher level.
Hayles goes on to discuss the “astonishing power”—in the now-familiar

technological sense of “power”—which these “arbitrary,” hierarchically
structured chains of codes generate, since manipulations, interpreted as
commands at one level, can have cascading, global effects.10 By shifting
the argument in this way, I think she has bracketed a more significant
consequence of the structure of signification which she is delineating: the
question of address, the address of the specific encoded “levels.”
In an article on “digital code and literary text,” Florian Cramer has pointed
out that, as he somewhat obscurely puts it, “the namespace of executable
instruction code and nonexecutable code is flat.”11 From the context it is clear
that he means that the same character or symbol set is used—for example—
to transcribe both the text being word processed and (to be precise) the
source code of the program which may be doing the word processing. On
the level plains of letters and bits, there is no radical disjuncture in the
symbolic media when we cross from a region of “executable” text to text
“for human consumption.” From the human reader’s point of view, they
are both more or less construable strings of letters; from the processing
hardware’s point of view they are more or less construable sequences of
voltage differences. On the one hand, this statement is related to the famous
inter-media translatability of digitized cultural objects (once coded, regular
procedures can be used to manipulate an image, a segment of audio, a
text, etc., without distinction, disregarding the significance or affect of the
manipulation). Cramer is, however, more concerned with the potential for
sampling and mixing code and text (in the contemporary music sense). Again,
as in Hayles’s analysis, the question of the address of specific code segments
and texts is bracketed. Not only is it bracketed, but the range of positions of
address is simplified, as if we are speaking of a flat letterspace for code on
the one hand and text on the other; whereas, clearly, there are many levels.
Both Cramer and Hayles recognize a multilevel hierarchy of codes without
elaborating or distinguishing them in the course of their discussions. Within
the field of networked and programmable media, at the very least, we can
acknowledge: machine codes, tokenized codes, low-level languages, high-
level languages, scripting languages, macro languages, markup languages,
operating systems and their scripting language, the human–computer
interface (HCI), the procedural descriptions of software manuals, and a very
large number of texts addressed to entirely human concerns.12
For Cramer, and not only for Cramer, this simplified, bracketed, or
ambiguous textual address has become a valorized aesthetic and even a
political principle: “computers and digital poetry might teach us to pay more
attention to codes and control structures coded into all language. In more
general terms, program code contaminates in itself two concepts which are
traditionally juxtaposed and unresolved in modern linguistics: the structure,
as conceived of in formalism and structuralism, and the performative, as
developed by speech act theory.”13 To attempt a paraphrase: working or
sampled or intermixed or collaged code, where it is presented as verbal
art, is seen by Cramer to represent, in itself, a revelation of underlying,
perhaps even concealed, structures of control, and also (because of its
origins in operative, efficacious program code) to instantiate a genuinely
“performative” textuality, a textuality which “does” something, which
alters the behavior of a system. It has the “astonishing power” of other
cultural manifestations of new technology and new media, the power that
Hayles has also recognized as a function of the coded structures arranged
at various “levels” in programmatological systems, chained together by a
literal topography, which is “flattened” by a shared symbol set. We should
pause to consider what this power amounts to. What are the systems whose
behavior can be altered by this power?
In the criticism of theoretically sophisticated poetics, there is a parallel
aesthetic and political agenda, which I am tempted to call the Reveal Code
Aesthetic. It is partly documented and particularly well represented in, for
example, Marjorie Perloff’s Radical Artifice, where “reveal code” is revealed
as a project of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers such as Charles Bernstein, after
having been properly and correctly situated in the traditions of process-
based, generative and/or constrained literature and potential literature by
Modernist, OuLiPian, Fluxus, and related writers culminating, for Perloff,
in John Cage and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers themselves.14 Although
the political and aesthetic of program of “reveal code” appears to be shared
with Cramer’s new media writers, in the context of Perloff’s poetics, the
codes revealed and deconstructed in language per se (rather than digitized
textuality) are as much those of “the inaccessible system core,” the machinic
devices that conceal “the systems that control the formats that determine
the genres of our everyday life.”15 While the progressive tenor of an aesthetic
and political deconstruction underlies this project, there is something of a
Luddite tone in Perloff.16 New media writers and artists necessarily have
more ambiguous political and aesthetic relations with the control structures
of the media which carries their work.
The code-revealing language artists discussed by Perloff, both in their
work and in their performance—be it textual performance or performance
art per se or activism or (academic) critical practice—represent far better
examples of the instantiation of pattern/randomness (distinguished from
presence/absence) than the novelists cited by Hayles, even including
Burroughs or Pynchon. While retaining her focus on the contemporary
or near-contemporary writers which she associates with an innovative,
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-inflected poetics having avant-garde inclinations,
Perloff recalls an extensive tradition of poetic literature which is marked

by both its attention to the materiality of language and its radicalization
of poetic practices.17 Perloff invokes formations and works by individuals
which are also referred to by critics of writing in networked and
programmable media. Like Cramer, she discusses the OuLiPo (Ouvroir de
Littérature Potentiel), the working group inspired and once led by Raymond
Queneau, which is, perhaps, the primary reference for literary projects which
are explicitly concerned with the application of algorithmic procedures,
arbitrary constraint, generative or potential literature, and relatively early
experimentation with the use of software. In doing so, she directly confronts
the “repression” of “numerical,” generative procedures in poetry and
poetics and turns to the work of John Cage as a cross-media figurehead.
While only a minor aspect of his oeuvre, as compared with his major
contribution to the art of (musical) sound, Cage’s mesostic texts, especially
his “reading through” of Pound, Joyce, and others, stitch to together a range
of concerns—inter-media art, procedural composition, the rereading (and
implicit deconstruction) of the High Modernists—which are highly relevant
to both contemporary poetics and writing in networked and programmable
media. If Cage’s work is recalled in the context of the Fluxus movement,
with which he is associated, then its relevance widens and deepens. Fluxus
is a model of performative art practice, including explicitly literary practice,
where the record of inscription is problematized (the work is an event, or
the publication of a set of materials which must be manipulated by the
reader/user), and where the presence/absence dialectic has been side-stepped
by representations which may literally absent an artist-author. Perloff does
not discuss Fluxus at length and so misses the opportunity to reassess
and contextualize work by two of the most important practitioners of the
“(numerical) repressed,” Emmett Williams and Jackson Mac Low, both of
whom deserve serious study as precursors if not “anticipatory plagiarists”
of writing in networked and programmable media.18 Fluxus also provides
a historical, critical link to the traditions of visual and concrete poetics,
which are discussed in Perloff’s account, particularly relevant work by Steve
McCaffery and Joanna Drucker. The materiality of this work, considered
as language art, visibly demonstrates a radical engagement with linguistic
media and a requirement for the reader to engage with the codes—textual,
rhetorical, paratextual, visual, and so on—by and of which the work is
constituted.
If such prior work remains inadequately acknowledged in the discussion
and reassessment of “codework,” this may be, in part, simply because the
traces of its inscriptions are captured and recorded in the “durable material
substrates” of print culture. Whereas Lacan’s “floating signification” is read
as an analytic metaphor, applied to language borne by a delivery media—
print—on which the signs of the interface texts literally “rest” (where they
have been impressed) or, at best, “interleave” (they do not “float”), we read
Hayles’s “flickering signifiers,” as she encourages us to do so, as literally

“flickering,” and constituent, as such, of text which has become “screenic.”
As such, it seems to exist elsewhere, not on the page but through the
window of the screen in the informatic realm.19 Undoubtedly, there are clear
and historical distinctions of delivery media for text. Nonetheless, we must
be careful to distinguish the effects of delivery media on signification and
affect from those produced by shifts in the compositional media, and there
is great congruence between the approach to compositional media of certain
print-based writers, such as those discussed by Perloff, for example, and
the potential use of compositional media which is suggested by new media,
that is, new delivery media. This potential of text- and language-making
is not necessarily engaged simply because new delivery media happen to
be employed.20 The locus classicus for a multilayered, multilevel code-
inflected writing and reading is, of course, Barthes’s S/Z, as Hayles explicitly
acknowledges.21 S/Z was concerned with a short story programmed in
“a persistent material substrate,” but Barthes was nonetheless able to
demonstrate the potential for an iterative flickering of hermeneutic attention
across structured linguistic codes, implying, I would argue, perfectly
adequate complexity, mobility, and programmability in the compositional
media. Barthes’s essay, after all, was not a demand for new media but a (re)
call to new or latent ways of reading and writing.
We turn, nonetheless, to examples of what Cramer calls “codework.”
Cramer cites, among others, some of those writers in networked and
programmable media whose work I, too, would consider in this context:
Mez, Talan Memmott, Alan Sondheim, Jodi. Leaving Jodi to one side for
the moment, these are all artists who both work with code and make coded,
programmatological objects. They are particularly known and notable for
working code and code elements into what we might call the “interface
text,” the words which are available to be read by the human audiences they
address.22 The result is a language which seems to be—depending on your
perspective—enlivened or contaminated by code. In the rhetoric of this type
of artistic production, contamination or infection (see Cramer as quoted
above and Hayles below) is more likely to be the requisite association since
transgression of the deconstructed systems of control is an implicit aspect
of the aesthetic agenda. For the moment, however, we are more concerned
with certain formal and material characteristics of the resulting language.
The language certainly reveals code and code elements, but what code
does it reveal? What does it tell a code-naïve reader about the characteristics
and the power of code? Is it, indeed, still code at all? At what level does
it sit in the chained hierarchies of flickering signification? Has it been
incorporated into the “interface text” in a way which reflects its hierarchical
origin, if it has one? Only if these and other questions can be given answers
which specify how and why code is sampled in this writing would be it
“codework” in a strong sense. (Perhaps we should reserve Mez’s “code
wurk” for the weaker sense of code-contaminated language.) In the case

of all of these writers (we’ll come to Jodi shortly), the code embedded in
the interface text has ceased to be operative or even potentially operative.
It is “broken” in the now-familiar programmer’s jargon. The breakdown
of its operations eliminates one aspect of its proposed aesthetic value and
allure, its native performative efficacy (which Cramer identified as a final
throwaway without actually demonstrating or elaborating): the power of
code to change the behavior of a system. The code-as-text is more in the way
of decoration or rhetorical flourish, the baroque euphuism of new media.
This is not to say that—as part of the interface text—it may not generate
important significance and affect. In particular, the address of this type of
intermixed, contaminated language is often concerned—as shown in the
work of all of these writers—with issues of identity, gender, subjectivity,
technology, technoscience, and the mutating and mutable influence they
bring to bear on human lives and on human-human and human-machine
relationships.
For the moment, however, we are more concerned with certain formal and
material characteristics of the resulting language. In a recent conference paper,
Hayles has discussed the language of Memmott’s From Lexia to Perplexia in
terms of pidgins and creoles. “In this work the human face and body are re-
coded with tags in a pidgin that we might call, rather than hypertext markup
language, human markup language. Code erupts through the surface of the
screenic text, infecting English with programming languages and resulting
in a creole discourse that bespeaks an origin always already permeated
by digital technologies.”23 Similarly, Mez has characterized her textual
production as written in a new “language/code system” which she calls
“mezangelle.” It is perhaps unfair to treat what may be metaphoric usages
as literal; however, I believe this use of pidgin and creole is, in particular,
a significant misdirection. A pidgin is a full-blown language, albeit arising
from the encounter and hybridization of two or more existing languages; a
creole is a pidgin which has become a first language for speakers raised by
previous generations who have created or used a pidgin. The point here is
that, in the case of a pidgin, the elements which combine to generate new
language are commensurate—linguistic material is not simply being injected
from one hierarchically and functionally distinct or programmatologically-
operative symbolic sub-system, which is subsumed within a full-blown
culture-bearing system of human language use into another. The creation
of a pidgin is, furthermore, the result of interactions by commensurate
entities, that is, humans. In the code-as-text which we have seen to date—
in the texts of a reveal code aesthetic—human-specified code elements and
segments are, typically, incorporated into what I have called the “interface
text” which is unambiguously and by definition an instance of some human-
readable language. It may be contaminated, jargonized, disrupted language,
but it is not a new language, not (yet) evidence for the invasion of an empire
of machinic colonizers whose demands of trade and interaction require

the creation of a pidgin by economically and linguistically disempowered
human users.24 The codeworks currently available to us extend, infect, and
enhance natural language, but they do not create, for example, Code Pidgin
English.25
The code has ceased to function as code. The resulting text pretends an
ambiguous address: at once to human reader and to machinic processor, but
both human and machine must read the code as part of human discourse.
We would not try to compile the code in the interface texts of Memmott,
Mez, or Sondheim. Nonetheless, this pretended ambiguity of address
remains important to the aesthetics of this work. It assumes or encourages
an investment on the part of its readers in the technology of new media
and, especially, in the dissemination of textual art in new media. Thus,
the experiences of the reader in these worlds can be brought to bear on
their reading of the codework and they can appreciate, through more-or-
less traditional hermeneutic procedures, the references and allusions to
technology, technoscience, and the issues with which they confront us.
However, I would argue, if this pretended ambiguity of address exhausts the
aesthetics and politics of a project (I am not saying that it does in any of these
cases), then it leaves open questions of the work’s affect and significance
when compared, for example, with previous poetic work in more durable
material and linguistic substrates, some of which has been cited above.26
The work of Sondheim needs to be singled out, in terms of practice and
form, since his use of code is well integrated into a long-term and wide-
ranging language art project. The print-media version of Jennifer, for
example, reads more in the tradition of innovative or avant-garde writing
than as subsumed within codework or a reveal code aesthetic.27 Most of the
texts in this selection are manipulated language, but often using procedures
which are not directly related to codes and processing. Thus, while his
overt subject matter—mediated gender and sexuality, explicitly inflected by
computing and technoscience—and his explicitly chosen media keep him
immediately allied with codeworking colleagues, Sondheim’s work must also
be read against earlier and contemporary writers working within or with a
sense of the formally and aesthetically innovative traditions of poetics, and
not only the poetics which intersects with Burroughs and Acker.28
In the necessity to read the work in both a programmatological context
and in the broader context of innovative writing—though in this sense only—
Sondheim’s engagement rhymes momentarily with that of Loss Pequeño
Glazier. Glazier and his work represent a literal and explicit embodiment
of “a set of relationships—relationships constituted by artistic practice—
between a newly problematized linguistic materiality and represented
content.” Glazier has produced a body of work, grounded in an existing
writing practice, which has covered a wide range of potential forms for
digital poetics and he has, moreover, documented and analyzed this trajectory
in a series of critical contributions.29 Glazier’s work is characterized by his

use of code and the language of code. In this, I believe, he affords himself
significant ironies. He writes, for example:
The language you are breathing becomes the language you think … These
are not mere metaphors but new procedures for writing. How could it
be simpler? Why don’t we all think in UNIX? If we do, these ideas are
a file: I am chmoding this file for you to have read, write, and execute
permission—and please grep what you need from this! What I am saying
is that innovative poetry itself is best suited to grep how technology
factors language and how this technology, writing, and production are as
inseparable as Larry, Moe, and Curly Java.30
This is discursive prose of a kind, but it is infected or contaminated by both

code and poetry. Glazier doesn’t think in UNIX, nor would he ever wish to
do so. But his language is not “mere metaphor” (poetry is not metaphor) it
is centered on language-making (what poetry is), and it demands a poetic
practice which is alive to new procedures and new potential and which
is sensitive to the changes this practice produces in the materiality of the
language itself. Apart from its engagement with code and coding, Glazier’s
work is also characterized by its bilingualism, or rather the multilingualism
of “America” in the sense of a Latin America which exists as historical
and political soul and shadow throughout, arguably, the greater part of
the United States. I raise this point to highlight distinctions in the way we
may choose to consider the non-standard English material in Glazier’s (and
others’) texts, while recalling Hayles’s metaphoric analysis via “pidgin”
and “creole.” In a Glazier text, there is a use of English intensified by an
address to the materiality of language. There is the incorporation—in a
strong sense, sometime within the body of a word—of linguistic material
from Spanish and other languages, especially those indigenous to Mexico.
There is a similar incorporation of linguistic material from code and
from computing jargons.31 But whereas the use of other natural language
material evokes significance and affect which is commensurate with human
concerns—personal, political, social, and cultural history, and so on—the
use of “codewords” evokes other concerns, closer to questions of technology
and the technology of language. Glazier would rather think in Nahuatl than
in UNIX, but in practice he prefers to think in P=O=E=T=R=Y.
Jodi takes us to another point in the textonomy of code-as-text, a
relatively extreme position where code-as-text is, perhaps, all there is.32 It is
difficult to say anything hard and fast in terms of more or less conventional
criticism about a site which is hardly ever the same on successive visits.
Instead, I want to refer to what I remember of a visit in which a dynamic
HTML- and JavaScript-mediated experience proved to have been delivered
by HTML source which was, itself, a work of ASCII art.33 Here, the actual
code is a text, an artistic text. However, the code is not, in this instance,
working code (at least not “hard-working,” shall we say). It is comprised
of code segments which are ignored in the browser’s interpretation and
rendering of the HTML. The syntax of this markup language is particularly
easy to manipulate or appropriate in this way because comments—ignored
by any interpreter, by definition—may be extensive and because interpreters,
browsers in this case, are, typically, programmed to ignore any <tagged>
thing which they cannot render. The code works, but it is not all working
code. Again, it represents only a pretended ambiguity of address: its primary
structures of signification were never meant for a machine or a machinic
process.
I, too, have made a few “codeworks” of a not dissimilar kind. By
extracting and manipulating segments of the close-to-natural-language,
very-high-level, interpreted programming language, HyperTalk, I was able
to make human-readable texts which are also segments of interpretable,
working code:
on write
repeat twice
end repeat
repeat with programmers = one to always
if touching then
put essential into invariance
else
put the round of simplicity * engineering/synchronicity + one into
invariance
end if
if invariance is greater than the random of engineering and not
categorical then
put ideals + one into media
if subversive then
end if
if media is greater than instantiation then
put one into media
end if
else
put the inscription of conjunctions + one into media
end if
if categorical then put false into categorical
put media into ideals
put word media of field “text” of card understanding & “,text” into
potential
if the mouse is down then

put conjunctions into potential
put potential into card field agents
put true into encoded
exit repeat
end if
inflect
wait manipulation
put potential into conjunctions
put ideals into world
if performed then put false into performed
if programmers are greater than control and media & comma is in field
computer of card understanding & “,text” then exit repeat
end repeat
if not encoded and not touching then
if ideals are developed then wait five seconds
lock screen
end if
end write34
This text has genuinely ambiguous address—to a HyperTalk interpreter and

to human readers. It could (and does, in some versions of the software) alter
the behavior of a system, when included as one routine in a text generator.
Its address to human concerns is clearly ludic and, perhaps, pretends more
than it delivers in terms of significance and affect, but at least we can say,
with little qualification, that this code is the text.
But where is such a codetext going, in terms, for instance, of its formal
and rhetorical characteristics, in terms of its specific materiality? As a
text—let us provisionally call it a poetic text in the sense of a text which
implies some trial of language—which is addressed to human readers, it
has distinct limitations, constraints which disallow or compromise its
engagement with broader and more traditional concerns or sources of
cultural value. Nonetheless, for me, it suggests new or newly highlighted
rhetorical strategies which are specific to the materiality of language in
networked and programmable media. For the moment, I will identify two
such rhetorical fields of play: (1) the direct confrontation of strict logical-
syntactic symbolic composition (programming per se) with natural language
syntax and argument, and (2) what I think of as a potential “aesthetics of
compilation”: the creation of linguistic or symbolic constructs which are
designed, for example, to be read in one mode of address and at one level
of code in a chained hierarchy of symbolic systems, while simultaneously
intended for compilation into a systematically related code at a different

level within the hierarchy, with a different mode of address.
The first of these rhetorical fields represents an age-old and persistent
problem: that, indeed, of logic vs. rhetoric, although recast in specific
proliferating instances of logic-as-literature in new media. There is no
time or space in this shortly closing essay to take this on.35 Compilation in
language and literature, however, directly addresses the interrelation of code
and text; and it seems to me to be a good example of a rhetorical concept,
hitherto of little use where literary objects were inscribed in persistent and
durable material substrates, but of great potential in a literature constituted
by flickering signification. Texts are already being made to be compiled,
decompiled, recompiled, and so on.
I may have seemed to be arguing with flickering signification, by giving
examples of writing which appeared to demonstrate its structures of
code and text in systematically linked hierarchies, and then showing that
these structures were collapsed in many of the examples to hand. In fact,
I believe that the structures Hayles identifies and characterizes are clearly
operative in writing in networked and programmable media, just as they
are operative in certain types of innovative poetic practice. The writing of
flickering signification does, indeed, contribute to changes in the body of
literature, the literary corpus, both its “material substrate” and its “codes
of representation.” However, rather than the intermixing and mutual
contamination of code and text, we require not only a maintenance and
practical understanding of the distinction between code and text, we need at
least the same range and fineness of distinction as that which exist between
all the levels of programmatological languages and codes. The “power”—
including any affect and significance discoverable by interpretation—which
such structures of signification generate is dependent on these distinctions,
and on the compilation procedures, which I propose as rhetorical, by which
they are systematically related. This “power” is also, typically, in this context,
dependent on the concealment—the hidden working—of the code which
is thus allowed to serve its function as program, to generate the text and
offer it—iteratively, repeatedly, indeterminately—for instances of potential
performance, including the familiar performance of reading.
In her discussion of the flickering signifier and its filial relation to the
floating precursor of Lacan, mutation is the resultant process of a dialectic
implied by a new structure of signification, as parallel term for castration
in Lacan’s analysis. Mutation is “a decisive event in the psycholinguistics of
information. Mutation is the catastrophe in the pattern/randomness dialectic
analogous to castration in the presence/absence dialectic.”36 Mutation—
which evokes change, movement, the kinetic potential of text in new media,
the mimetic engagement of literature with the culture of human time—is
indeed a generative catastrophe for “literature” in the sense of immutable,
authoritative corpus. As writing in networked and programmable media,
language and literature mutate over time and as time-based art, according
to programs of coded texts which are embedded and concealed in their
structures of flickering signification. For the code to function as generator,
as programmaton, as manipulator of the text, it must, typically, be a distinct
part of the global textual system; it must be possible to recompile the codes
as operative procedures, as aspects of live-art textual practice. The code is
not the text.
5
Hypertext/Cybertext/Poetext
I
1. Reading, hearing, writing, performing the linguistically innovative
poetries and swept up in the enthusiasms of their deep, but lo-tech,
engagements with new textualities through formal experiment and in
their play of significations, there is a temptation to say to its practicing
writers and readers, “I/you/we/they don’t need ‘new’ technologies or ‘new’
media.” There is so much left to be explored, that is being explored, in both
codexspace and performancespace, as to suggest that it would be a waste
of time to buy into some novel textgadgetry; to risk an expense of spirit
in the wastes of techno-narcissism; or to subject poetics “to the trade of a
calculation that dominates most tenaciously in those areas where there is no
need of numbers.”1
2. No need of numbers? This essential term, read as enclosing a
contradiction, is at once the sign of art-less “calculation” and the basis of
all artistic formalism. Unresolved, it becomes a necessary reminder of the
romanticized dissociation of “writing” (or, more broadly, verbal creativity)
from its techniques and technologies, and the elevation of the former
over the latter, as if certain privileged spheres of rhetoric—literacy and its
codexspace being the examples necessary here—were transparent to the
content they selflessly bear, whereas other “newer” varieties are branded
forever with their technological origins.2
3. The machineries of hypertext, cybertext, and poetext are still often
confused with the potential rhetorics they adumbrate. Even if these transient
terms (as likely to fade and die out as to thrive within a short space of years
or months) referred to physical delivery media, such as those associated with
the cinema, there would still be no need in critical discourse to confuse the
equivalent of camera or projection device with, for example, the grammar of
montage. In fact, these technologically overdetermined textualities are realized
in formal engineering which is itself “authored,” and this fact provides such
textualities with many of the qualities which most clearly distinguish them
from other, previous and still dominant, technologies of literary culture.
4. “It is important to make it clear that literary developments in
cybertext are not constrained by hardware technologies themselves; they
are constrained only by software, which is an authored delivery medium.”
(Although “[a]part from these constraints which are surmountable through
engineering, there are those produced by, as it were, a ‘false consciousness’
generated by the ‘ideology’ surrounding the current use of computer-based
systems.”)3
5. “These agents [active, co-creative functions of cybertextual media] are
themselves constructed, and they may be authored by the writer or designer
of both given text and its modulated form (in any particular reading or
performance) as an integral part of the entire ‘work.’ Writers may also write
‘with and against and amongst’ the code.”4
6. [Thus,] the advocacy of hypertextual or cybertextual technologies
in the context of innovative poetics is not the same thing as promoting a
new and better word processor. It is a continuity with the development of
form-in-content or indeed the creation of new forms which has always been
characteristic of the ancient and various tradition of innovative linguistic art.
The writer may choose to inscribe new form itself in the work, proposing a
novel poetext with each new publication. (Versions of the present chapter
revisited simple, hypertextual reformations of the linear exposition, using
an indexing metaphor which is both familiar and internalized in Western
codexspace.) The point is, whereas I am severely constrained in my re-
engineering of an essay which will appear in a bound paper collection, in
software the potential is much greater, the forms are more plastic, such that
the creation of the form becomes an integral and appreciable part of the
creation of the work, if not a necessary part.
7. [For] there is no requirement to engineer a form for each new text,
no necessity to take up the (programming) skills which are the tools of a
conception of writing extended into the technologies of its production.
Form—even the conceptual poetic form and certainly not the (material)
delivery medium—does not necessarily, in itself, determine the nature of the
textuality instantiated in a particular work.
II
8. Apart from the advocacy of textual technologies to poetics as a continuation
of its own practices, there is a growing literature which represents hypertext
in particular as the instantiation or embodiment of modern and postmodern
critical theory.5 However, while this literature acknowledges a quantity of
previous, chiefly prose, work, especially modernist exemplars and criticism
HYPERTEXT/CYBERTEXT/POETEXT 69
associated with, for example, the poetics of Barthes and Tel Quel, and, to a
limited extent, writers associated with, Fluxus, the OuLiPo, poststructuralist
schools, and so on, and while it has engaged radical textualities in
“traditional” delivery media—codexspace—it has not, especially in its more
polemical moments or when focused on pedagogical methodology, given
the same degree of attention to radical poetries per se—for instance those of
Cage, Mac Low, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and so on. Even these new critics
of hypertext are occasionally caught in the uncertainty as to whether they
should promote a new projection device—the “new” delivery media of
electronic hypertext—or continue to develop a radical cultural critique. It
is as if the supposed representation of postmodern critical theory attracts
special privilege when set against its representation as a function of, say, the
writerly (scriptible) text of codexspace; as a function, that is, of the writer’s
proposal of new textualities, regardless of delivery media, and the reader’s
disposal of interpretative, intertextual engagements.6
9. The underlying metaphors of critical theory’s instantiation or embodiment
in “new media” are seductively rich, redolent of notions of (historical)
originality, novelty, incarnation. If hypertextuality is the signal of a paradigm
shift in verbal culture, then better ways of representing its significance may
be found in analyses of the previous shift from orality to literacy. Here, Ong’s
notion of the “internalization” of literacy is useful.7 It was not that codexspace,
especially books and printing, embodied or instantiated a latent literacy in
verbal cultures which had acquired writing technologies; rather, they allowed
the internalization of literacy, its elevation to the invisible, all-pervasive
“ground” of verbal culture, such that today, to take two examples, in high
critical discussion, papers are read out loud in a pseudo-oration which has
little, sometimes nothing, to do with orality, or, in the performance of poetry,
where the reading of hyper-literate production is a norm, even amongst many
poets for whom spontaneous “voiced” expression is an ideal.
10. Hypertext, [then], does not instantiate, but it may well allow the
internalization of textualities or modes of verbal culture which have been
characterized in recent critical theory. And, with the World Wide Web
growing daily, massively, in accessibility and popularity—and no more or
less socially or politically marked than was the printed codex—this does
seem increasingly likely.
III
[Not all of the characteristics of hypertext receive equal attention in
this chapter. Brief remarks will be made about many aspects of machine
modulated textuality before concentrating on its engagement with the
reader’s participation in the construction of meaning.]
11. Intertextuality is often cited as the modern critical term most

clearly associated with and “embodied in” hypertext, but, just as clearly,
intertextuality predates, even as critical concept, its cybernetic representations
by a period of time which, some might argue, is equal to the entire history
of literature. Going outside a text to other texts as a way of reading and
understanding is not a notion which is dependent on a particular technology
or is even, for that matter, confined to literacy (if, for these purposes, the
assumption of the priority of writing in the term “text” is bracketed). In
contemporary writing, intertextuality seems to me a “done deal,” an accepted
and necessary part of writing practice across a wide range of discourses and
genres. Beyond the promise of extreme convenience which is granted by
hypertextual systems like the World Wide Web, the existence of hypertext
does not add, conceptually, to our understanding of intertextuality as a
strategy of reading and understanding.
12. In so far as intertextuality has problematized the notion of closure,
however, the situation is more complex. Despite the priority of intertextuality
as a concept, the physicality of the textual object, in codexspace, contributes
to a sense of closure, and the related notions of, for example, “author”ization/
ity, integrity, position in the textual hierarchies of aesthetic/critical value,
“primary” vs. “secondary” material, and so on. Since hypertextual forms
may bracket or disrupt the physical closure of the text, they clearly have
potential to “open” the text to these underlying critical problems, and to
popularize, or at least make familiar, literary works which are already
predicated, for many of their effects, on this field of openness. The obvious
examples here are from the intrinsically non-closed serial poem, stemming
from The Cantos: Zukovsky’s A, Olson’s The Maximus Poems, and Blaser’s
Image-Nations.
13. While strategies for representing non-linear forms in codexspace can
and have been devised, cyberspace provides an environment in which a non-
linear poetics—perhaps even one generalized to encompass linear and time-
based varieties—should find room to grow and thrive.8
14. The problematization of the (unitary) identity, intentionality,
presence or, indeed, existence of author(ity) is already addressed in the
disruption of closure which hypertext proposes, although the composition
of the elements (lexia) of most currently existing hypertextual work
follows, for the most part, a conventional, “authoritarian” model. The
construction of procedural, generative work in cybertext does, however,
help to represent and generalize a disrupted, mediated, undermined
authorship, or, as some critics have recognized, a notion of “cyborg
authorship,” meaning one in which engineered reading or text-generation
procedures are recognized as jointly “responsible” for the work and in
which the human participant acknowledges arbitrary and procedural
elements of cultural (self-)construction as aspects of her manifest
identity(ies).9
IV
15. [Before returning to the reader’s participation in the construction of
meaning, consider that,] there are certain aspects of (potential) textuality
which are more or less specific to work which is realized as software—
procedures and figures which it would be very difficult to realize in other media.
Unsurprisingly, these potentialities are associated chiefly with the production
and presentation of the work, rather than with the literary substance of
what is produced and presented, although this distinction is more useful in
outlining these figures than it is in understanding them, where it instances the
same problematized relationship between “writing” and its media.
16. The permutational “power” of the computer allows an approach to
process-based work in which the adjective “experimental” takes on a sense
closer to that which it carries in the laboratory. The time and effort involved
in producing a text through procedural or chance operations by hand can be
considerable. Software can be used to generate these texts relatively quickly,
such that judgments may be made concerning both the results of the procedures
and the procedures themselves. The implications of these judgments can then
be fed back into the co-creative process. Alterations can be made to both the
given texts and the procedures used to generate the final work. All this can be
done quickly enough to give rise to a fruitful feedback loop, to experiments in
the creation of meaning which even a scientist might recognize as such.
17. As delivery media, computer systems also allow the real-time
presentation of aleatory and procedural work, which may be both complex
and radically indeterminate to a degree which is very difficult to realize in
codexspace. Not that the presentation of such work is impossible in more
familiar media. Even as books, Yi Jing (The Classic of Change), Raymond
Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes, Mark Saporta’s Composition no. 1,
for example, allow their readers to become the producers of their texts, to such
an extent that these works properly should not be considered as fixed texts at
all—neither the static record of, for example, many throws of the dice, nor the
application of, say, diastic rules (as with certain of Mac Low’s printed works),
nor a function of some set of specific readings by particular readers—the work
in these and other cases is the entire conception and the whole process of its
reading. Literary objects engineered through software (especially where the
software is immediately accessible to or manipulable by the “reader”) allow a
more thorough realization of works with similar textual characteristics (see 28
below), potentially works which may exist only as the literary performance of
the object itself—where, for example, there is no static or persistent inscription,
only a writing which is presented in a particular duration.
18. This type of work also reveals the explicit introduction of a third
term into the writer/reader probability space. The programmer or engineer
of the procedures takes on a role that is much more than that of facilitator/
technician in an unusual form of publication. As the procedural manipulation
of literary texts becomes more sophisticated, the role of the designer of

processes approaches that of the writer.
19. “Each term of the writer/reader/programmer triangle is a shifter.
Just as writer may be reader, and reader, writer in current (postmodern)
critical perspectives, so either of these absent agents may be programmers:
systematic manipulators of text and intertext, making use of software which
has become intimate with poetics. Poets and readers must become intimate
with software.”10 At the present juncture, the distinctions between the
identities or positions represented by these three terms have been subverted
(rightly so) by critical thinking; they remain in place more as a function of
established or preferred cultural practice, actions and behaviors associated
culturally with readers, writers, and programmers. Yet without even invoking
the current disruptions of programmable media, it can be seen, for example,
that the roles of writer and reader are constructed within particular cultures,
and even within the micro-cultures of particular groups of reader/writers—
mainstream/avant-garde; British poetry/US poetry/Irish poetry—and that
“programming” a text, in the sense of designing it for a suggested mode of
reading, has always been at least partly within the gift of the writer, and since
the advent of desk-top publishing, has progressively involved both writers
and readers in acts of what I’d be happy to call “textual programming.”
20. If, through hypertext or any other delivery technology, literary objects
are constructed as “open,” then this permeability of writer/programmer is
extended to reader/programmer, as readers configure or radically change the
literary objects of their attention.
21. [Finally,] the potential media represented by networked computing
systems offer novel metaphors and models for some of the crucial subjects
of poetic writing. To take just one simple example, in the world of networks,
multiuser systems—those sharing information-processing resources
across several terminals—are a commonplace. The popularization of this
new metaphoric vehicle may make it easier to conceive of multiplicity or
decentralization in relation to, say, the brain(s) or body(ies) of the mind(s) or
person(s) seen as multiuser system(s), but without the usual associations of
such multiplicity with personality disorder, mental illness or harmful, anti-
social disjunctions. For, in networked computing, plurality, multiple/parallel
processing, and decentralization are signs of robustness and efficiency in our
attempts to represent, manipulate, and create meaning from complex inputs
and interactions.
V
22. [Briefly,] how might the existence of these systems and literary objects
lead to the internalization of a shifted paradigm for language art? The
usual way to answer this would be to say that it would arise out of the
popularization of new forms of textuality and as a function of perceived

homologies between those forms and the new structures of understanding
represented by developments in critical theory. Forms which demonstrate
these homologies would tend to be privileged over more traditional forms,
where the new forms matched ascendant, albeit subversive, modes of
thought, as formal exemplars of that thought.
23. [However,] perhaps it would be as well not to attempt to ascribe any
sort of priority to forms of thought and simply to see the popularization of
alternative textualities as the development of “new forms of life”—and as
hard evidence of realizable potentialities—not, necessarily, as homologous
with supportive theoretical structures, but evolving and proliferating
themselves along with other cultural and technological developments until
they finally allow the internalization of strategies for the creation of meaning
which are currently difficult or rare.11
VI
24. Interactivity is, on the face of it, one of the most attractive and
compelling promises held out by the new technotextuality, as also by the
entire multimedia thrust of networked infotainment. Apart from their more
directly venal ambitions, these would-be producer/broadcasters dream of
replacing passive televisual half-life with “a fully interactive experience.”
Meanwhile the makers of interactive texts promise real-time reader
interactivity with the substance and sense of literary creation itself, as an
(obvious) improvement over the (passive) consumption of the printed word,
locked into lines and bound into the structure of the codex.
25. [But] “interaction” is a term which sits happily in the phrase “complex
interaction,” and it implies reciprocity and mutual influence, between
persons and/or things. It is too rich a term for the programmed stimulus
and response, or configurational controls which are currently offered over
the limited channels of today’s electronic publishing systems—keyboard,
pointing device, screen; less commonly simple voice recognition and speech-
generation; full-motion video or virtual reality if you are lucky. Doubtless,
the technology will improve and improve quickly. In the meantime, it is
strange that there is so much willingness to apply the term “interaction”
to simple human–machine exchanges when in face-to-face encounters with
other persons (or animals or things for that matter) we have experiences
which are truly interactive, to an extent which might make us wary of
applying the term when dealing with software.
26. Transactional might be more like it, as in the phrase a “simple
transaction” or the sense of transaction as “a piece of business,” not only
because it would be more consonant with current systems’ capabilities, but
also because it points to the underlying intentionality of many developers
of so-called interactive technologies, for they will be quite happy to develop

televisual culture up to a point where certain economically “essential”
transactions may be carried out, but then, suddenly, have little inclination
for taking things further, pending some return on their investment in R&D.
27. Interactivity might well be one of the goals of an extended textuality,
but it is not enough to be content with or to fetishize a model of interactivity
which is simply the arts-pages equivalent of handing over electronic credits
in the virtual intermall as a (self-reflexive) expression of “choice.”
28. The question of interactivity is, however, a useful tool in the
interrogation of the “writerly” text, and its readers’ participation in the
creation of meaning. Espen Aarseth, in the course of his work on textuality
in its new domains, has attempted to outline a method for categorizing
different varieties of textuality, regardless of delivery medium.12 Interactivity
per se does not enter into his discussion. To radically simplify his scheme,
he assesses texts on the basis of their Dynamics (static or alterable);
Determinability; Transience (does the text reveal itself with the passing of
time or must it be looked over/worked at); Perspective (allowing role playing
by the reader or not); Access (random or controlled); Linking (explicit or
conditional or no linking); and (the most complex scale) “User” function
(interpretative or explorative or configurative or “textonic” which implies
the ability of readers to co-author the text). Such a scheme allows him not
only to characterize and analyze the widest range of textual phenomena,
including the extraordinary, more genuinely interactive textuality of MUD
and MOO spaces, but also to make some useful broader categorizations,
elaborating on those represented by hypertext and cybertext, or ergodic and
non-ergodic literature.13
29. For Aarseth, “cybertext” is a more inclusive term capable of
encompassing most of the currently conceivable aspects of what we might
call interactivity—text generation (dynamics), indeterminacy, animation
(transience), role-playing perspective, configurative and authorship-sharing
“user” functions, and so on. Hypertext is reserved for the normally static,
but linked and randomly accessible texts which are now familiar to us
through the World Wide Web. “Ergodic” texts are those which demand
“work” from the reader above and beyond the work of interpretation (the
“success” of which is bracketed pending authoritative critical judgment), or,
in Aarseth’s more considered terms, “The ergodic work of art is one that in
a material sense includes the rules for its own use, a work that has certain
requirements built in that automatically distinguishes between successful
and unsuccessful users.”14
30. Clearly, schemes such as Aarseth’s are useful for the better
understanding of textual technologies, and this is entirely within the scope
of every poet’s concerns. However, poets, even the innovative variety, seem
to have been primarily interested in the construction of highly sophisticated
texts which nonetheless remain conservative in their exploitation of the
potential of textuality itself as a plastic medium. There are good reasons for
this. The “interpretative user function” in Aarseth’s scheme is, after all, the
doorway to the writerly universe. While the manifest textuality of a poem
may be limited in its “technology,” it may nonetheless open out into endless
readings, ramifications, inspirations, linkings, intertextualities, not only in
the mind of the reader, but in her library, her own writing, her life. There is
nothing stopping a reader from extending the meaning-creation of any text
of any kind outside itself into radically new and indeterminate (literary)
situations. Returning to the spirit in which this chapter set out: what more
do you want?
VII
31. [However,] poets, even the most codextextual, have also been concerned
with the notion of performance, if not of the work itself in ritual, vocalized
utterance, then at least in the performance of their texts within the world
of letters or, indeed, reputation. So, I want to examine those types of
performance which are accessible to some basic varieties of language art,
while bearing in mind the potential for interactivity which is presented by
these various performance modes, aiming to arrive at a point in which the
mode of performance offered by a cybertextual poetics may be perceived
more clearly.15
32. Strangely, in the performance of “purely oral” language art (as Ong
makes clear), there is room for indeterminacy and true listener (“reader”)
interaction. The bard never—or only in the most exceptional circumstances—
performs the same work in the same words; the bard is always responsive
to the mood and demands of the audience, to a degree which is typically
far greater than that offered by the reading poet. This is strange, because
the sound of the work is all there is—it is a transient shape as language
in time and space which, instantaneously, returns to absolute physical
nothingness the moment the performer’s voice ceases (unlike this chapter,
for example, which seems to persist because your reader’s eyes constantly,
without attending to it, refresh its image in the mind and because you may
return to it in a different time and place). There is no “text” or recording
in pure orality from which to recover the shape of the work. Moreover,
when that shape is realized again, by the same or by another performer, it is
significantly different. Despite these disjunctions, listeners have no difficulty
in identifying and distinguishing particular works.
33. In the “pure literacy” of codexspace—I mean the, perhaps,
unobtainable ideal of applied grammatology—the text performs silently,
without necessary reference to a prior or an anticipated voice. What
interaction there is takes place not in relation to an author, but with the text
itself, or rather with impressions of the text which are transferred into the
textual life of the reader. The text itself does not change, although the way it
is constructed and printed may indicate alternate reading strategies, and the
random or indexed reordering of sub-elements may be possible. However,
the most meaningful extension of the text occurs through the (unlimited)
interpretative function of the reader (see 30 above), who may even experience
the indication of alternate strategies—where they are enforced by the writer,
designer, or programmer—as an unwarranted attempt to control or contain
the reader’s self-liberated pleasures of the text.
34. [But] pure literacy is an unrealized state in a culture which, although it
can hardly (re)conceive of pure orality—despite its continued existence on the
planet and despite the fact that it precedes our own internalized literacy—is
nonetheless logocentric. Typically, written texts, where they do not explicitly
transcribe—as in the earliest form of text-based performance, namely, plays,
or in novelistic dialogue—imply speech or verbal performance. Paradoxically,
such texts, which indicate a voice and often pretend to realize their (full)
potential in ritual, voiced readings, are those which seem to preserve their
authorial integrity, as their readers-turned-listeners maintain absolute
decorum and silence in the auditorium—which may also be an imaginary
auditorium, faithfully constructed by a silent reader for the poet’s voice. In
poetry, the impetus to perform is strong and, in contemporary culture, it
grows stronger as we hear some of the most innovative writers turning to
forms which, while based on experimental literacy, nonetheless achieve their
most faithful representation in oral realizations. Thus, the fruitful, suggestive
oxymoron of “performance writing” swims into view, recast and partially
resolved in the strongly indicative phrase, “writing as performance.”
35. [Finally, in this brief and partial sketch,] cybertextual technologies
offer a potential form of pure literacy with a—currently limited—capacity
to, itself, perform. The performance of literary objects may be read back into
both the pure literacy of the silent text and also into text-based performance
writing, but cybertextual technologies already exist which, as mentioned
above, animate the generation of procedural and chance modulated work in
“real time.” Although there is a long way to go before such literary objects
display any depth in their appropriation of, say, the less exploited terms
in Aarseth’s analysis of textuality, existing works have invoked dynamics,
indeterminability, transience, random access, linking, reader configuration,
and reader co-creation of textual elements.16 The potential for the interaction
of literary objects with both readers and also the third term, programmers,
is not closed, and will continue to problematize the role of the author, who
may also be an interactive reader or programmer. In the last analysis, the
meaning-creation of the work is provided by the performance of the literary
object itself.
36. While the instances of interactivity offered by existing texts are
currently extremely limited, it is important to remember that this need not
always be the case, and remark that the type of interactivity offered is different
from that offered by, in particular, the (pure) literary art of codexspace and
of text-based performance. The interactivity offered by pure orality was
both what I will call catastrophic/judgmental (limited to the dismissal of the
work, its rejection or forcible suppression—for example, stopping a speaker,
“putting down” a book) and also cooperative/critical/co-creative. Bard and
audience were able to develop a relationship—not one in which skill (even
mastery) was necessarily in doubt, nor a sense of the “priority” of the impetus
to produce verbal art, but one, nonetheless, which allowed the work to be
significantly, meaningfully changed and, in exceptional circumstances, co-
created. These possibilities, which are not typically or materially available
to pure literary or text-based performance (where interaction is too often
consigned to its catastrophic/judgmental mode) are not only accessible
but, arguably, extended and radicalized in a cybertextuality where literary
objects themselves both perform to their readers and are worked with by
these readers as co-authors and co-programmers.
37. In this “late age of print,” writers are tantalized by the potentiality
of programming (pro-writing) which may allow cooperative, co-creational
interaction with their own works.17 This is a potentiality which is already
some part of the experience of all readers and writers, but it has typically
been seen as allied with the (radical, subversive, occasional) practices of
writers who are, at times, characterized as “innovative.” If the language-based
textualities of cyberspace are not drowned out in the coming audiovisual
deluge, they promise to internalize a new, but (strangely, theoretically)
familiar form of literacy for a much broader community of reader-writer-
programmers.18
6
Writing on Complex Surfaces
Flatland
If the vitality of our cultural morphology only makes sense in the fractal
complexities of historical space-time, Flatland with its plane geometries
of irony, misogyny and denial won’t work. The symbolic is always such
a flatland in its relation to the complex real. In a fractal relation between
art and life—that is, art as a fractal form of life—an infinitely invaginated
surface of linguistic and cultural coastlines, interconversant edges of past/
present/future, gives us, if not depth, then the charged and airy volume
of living matter.1
These remarks by the poet and poethical essayist Joan Retallack surface in
the midst of an essay that is itself formally innovative, performing parts of
what it proposes. The sentences conclude a brief incisive critique of Jean
Baudrillard’s conception of an all-surface hyperreality or irreality, where,
he claims, map becomes territory. Retallack challenges the pretended, ironic
profundity of this exemplary postmodernist cultural critic, pointing out that
not only would he leave us living on a flatland, he makes it impossible for
us ever to escape. Baudrillard concedes a predominant cultural condition in
which the symbolic both rests upon and constitutes an entirely superficial
“reality.” In a sense, his supposed insight is merely the recognition and
acceptance of an existing textual condition, that of authoritative language
(including his own) resting on the page; he simply gestures toward a number
of the paradoxical and ironic consequences of maintaining an all-too-
familiar preexisting paradigm.
Retallack’s subversion of the would-be subversive is intellectually telling,
and it is also effective because she understands it in terms of poet(h)ical
practice, both her own and the potential practice in which she suggests that
other writers participate, what might be termed an engaged formalism,
a poetics that is ethically charged with “interconversation” at “linguistic

and cultural coastlines.” Her own work clearly demonstrates and demands
reading and writing in terms of a complex, fractal surface, implicated with
time and history. Her texts are the traces of processes and procedures,
involving erasure, error, changing states, affective and effective action. The
very titles of her poethical collections—Errata 5uite, Afterrimages, How to
Do Things with Words—indicate strategies for reading that require us to shift
our attention and engagement beneath, above, with, and through the surface
of writing, and to replay and anticipate processes which both generate and
constitute the text itself.2 For Retallack, complex, procedural, (re)iterative
responses to her processes of writing is the text. It is an intrinsically temporal
entity chaotically inscribed on a complex surface.
Practices of writing find themselves constrained by at least two imbricated
cultural formations: institutions of authority governing publication and
traditionally perceived characteristics of language-as-material. Addressed
to writing, “depth” is rarely conceived as material depth. Depth is even
more abstracted when it is applied, critically, metaphorically, to writing
than when, for example, it is applied to painting. Generally speaking, rather
than any aspect of material depth, it signifies access, through a symbolically
marked but dimensionless and transparent surface (paradoxically, it is the
marks that render the surface transparent) to the interiority of a remote
author, an author whose very authority is guaranteed by institutions of
publication which are, in a circular, bootstrap logic, predicated on flatland
delivery, with all traditionally perceived material characteristics of language
intact, or rather, collapsed, resting, flattened, on paper-thin media, ready to
be read and passed through.
A related argument—that practices of writing are constrained by actual
physical media—paper and the book—is often resisted by poetic writers,
those, that is, who produce work which challenges flatland authority and
engages with language-as-material.3 While paper is thin and print is flat,
nevertheless, these “old” media allow many ways to indicate, if not perform,
a text’s material depth, its temporality, its constitution as process. Books
can be programs. Because deep, time-based poetic practice has a history,
including a tradition of serious intellectual exposition and commentary,
poetic practitioners often also demonstrate their suspicion of so-called
“new” media. They resist work in new media which reads as “thin” despite
its explicitly, overtly complex surface; and they resist a potential future of
overdetermination by unproven writing machines.
In agreement with many active poets, I do not, and would not, argue
that print-based textuality is incapable of delivering writing with a complex
surface, but I do say that in so far as this is achieved it is achieved as concept,
in the familiar and comfortable realm of literary virtuality, in the “mind” and
in the “imagination,” but not in the material experience of the text and its
language. In our present times, so long as the dimensionless surface of writing
WRITING ON COMPLEX SURFACES 81
casts its pall over the writing surfaces of the screen, it will remain difficult
to make an unarguable case for the specificities of writing in programmable
media. The screen should not simply be cast as the bearer, for example, of
multiple (flat) surfaces or successive “states” of text; it must be viewed as a
monitor for complex processes, processes which, if they are linguistic, will
be textual and symbolic, with a specific materiality as such. We must be able
to see and read what the screen presents rather than recasting what passes
before our eyes as the emulation of a “transparent” medium.
From a certain perspective, the arguments I am developing here may
appear to be a more or less familiar rerun of critical comparison between
print and digital media as they are applied to literary art. I wager that by
redeploying such arguments while retaining focus on the surface of writing,
a clearer conception of the properties and methods of textuality itself
will emerge. Flatland text on paper-thin surfaces will be appreciated once
again as a particular, relatively specialized instance of a more abstract and
generally applicable textual object, one, for example, that is able to engage
with and comprehend human time. Time is arguably the most important,
necessary, and most neglected property of textuality. A complex surface for
writing allows time to be reinstated as integral to all processes of writing
and reading.
Rather than continuing to try and present a case in terms of the literary
virtuality of poetic theory, this chapter now offers a commentary on
examples of textual practice that can be properly appreciated only in terms
of writing on a surface that is both materially and conceptually complex,
and intrinsically temporal.
North by northwest
My first example is taken from the unacknowledged prehistory of textual
animation as pioneered in the art of film titles, arguably the first medium in
which words moved.4 Apart from helping to give writing in programmable
media a historical context, cinematic titling also demonstrates that the
complex surface of writing is not, of necessity, media-specific. It does not
require the screens of programmable machines. While the vast majority of
film titles are instances, at best, of subtle and conservative design, there is a
tradition of innovative formal engagement, and one of its most important
exponents—the first acknowledged artist of film titling—is Saul Bass.5
Despite the fact that Bass’s work emerges from design as opposed to fine art
or literary practice, I would argue that the film titling that made his name
is a groundbreaking engagement with the materiality of language in what
was then still a new medium for text. In his most innovative work Bass used
the paratextual features of letter and word forms both to define graphic
space and to dwell and move in and over the surfaces of the illusionistic
naturalism within the already well-developed visual rhetoric of narrative
cinema. He recast the surfaces on which he “wrote” and rendered them
complex in some of the ways that concern us.
Bass achieved this during the second half of the 1950s, in his
groundbreaking titles for films from The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)
through Psycho (1960) and, to a certain extent, Spartacus (1960). The
latter marks a distinct shift in his practice, after which, in the 1960s and
1970s, he turned away from film titling and worked more directly with the
visual imaginary of cinema, as then understood. The titles for Spartacus use
photorealist images of objects—especially a bronze bust—but shot such that
they hover on the edge of the silhouette-abstraction that had become a Bass
trademark. From Spartacus on, the actual words of his titles are distinct
typographic forms floating over or through the visual imaginary that they
caption. In Spartacus, a letter-edge might still have caught on the edge of a
silhouette. What and where is the surface of writing when this is possible?
By contrast, none of the words in the titles for Cape Fear (1991) would
share a surface with the water and shadow over which they move.
This more familiar, later work—in what has become the established mode
of film titling—sets the innovations of Bass’s 1950s work in sharp relief.
The typographic “rule”—typically a printed bar of ink—was an important
trans-medial element in his film titles of the time. Rules are quintessentially
paratextual.6 They share the surface of writing, and they share its graphic
materiality—particularly contrasting monochrome color. They manage
and marshal the spaces in which writing is set, but they are not writing
in the strict sense of symbolic representation. At one and the same time,
rules are also lines, lines that may shape themselves into abstract visual
representations. Rules problematize the surface of writing; they are both
writing and not writing both on the surface of writing and on a surface of
another dimension of writing. They bound and define the surface of writing,
and they may even, in certain contexts, as Bass showed, become the surface
of writing.
Titles for The Man with the Golden Arm demonstrate this perfectly
(Figure 6.1). A single heavy rule sweeps down to mark the director’s credit;
three more are propagated and, while introducing the names of the (three)
lead actors, suggest, to my eye, walking legs. Three of the four vanish, leaving
one upper rule, with the three now returning, sweeping in from the other
screen edges, to set out the superbly composed spaces of the film’s title. The
same rules go on to marshal and punctuate the remaining credits, suggesting
more visual forms and spaces, and also, I would argue, letter forms, before
finally and infamously combining to become the jagged silhouette of the
“golden arm” itself.
Rules in Bass’s work do not typically become letters, but they do interfere
with the surfaces of writing—sometimes making the switch from foreground
FIGURE 6.1 Still from the opening titles, designed by Saul Bass, for The Man with
the Golden Arm, directed by Otto Preminger, United Artists, 1955.
to background and becoming a newly delineated surface of inscription

(Figure 6.2). This is shown, for example, if we consider the torn-out surface
spaces of the titles for Bunny Lake Is Missing as a special type of rule. Rules
can also interfere directly with writing, which provides one interpretation
of the titles for Psycho where they become manic and overwhelming, slicing
through the caption words, momentarily allowing us to glimpse and read,
before destroying legibility in a striated frenzy that is permanently linked
with cinema’s most notorious shocker.
Bass’s masterpiece is the title sequence for North by Northwest (1959),
where the surface of writing is remarkably complex. The rules we discuss
above are present in their primary role as the squared lines supporting text.
But more, in this sequence, their formation of a (archi)textual gridwork also
provides a direct link to the visual imaginary, to a world of real images,
a prefiguration of Bass’s personal concerns with cinema per se and also,
I’d argue, an unconscious premonitory graphic representation not only
of the interaction of the symbolic and the real but of the information-age
virtual and the real. These titles are a “central processor” of writing in new
media, before its time had come, and a superb demonstration of writing on
a complex surface.
FIGURE 6.2 Still from the opening titles, designed by Saul Bass, for Anatomy of a
Murder, directed by Otto Preminger, Columbia Pictures, 1959.
The sequence opens with a landscape-aspect grid receding in perspective,

not yet quite recognizable as the surface of a modernist office block
(Figure 6.3). Words of the titles glide in on the gridlines and, in particular,
glide up and down the vertical lines where they meet and come momentarily
to rest for reading. As they do so, their movements are suddenly like those of
elevators in a building, giving us one of the first visual clues to a real-world
referent for the abstract grid as a signifier or representation.
This resemblance of the words’ movements to elevators marks what is,
for Bass, an uncharacteristic evocation of Concrete poetics—words behaving
like objects.7 Paratextual elements, like rules, are allowed to crossover, via
abstraction and over the complex writing surface, into the visual, but words
remain set in legibility, as tokens of the symbolic. They must do this, since film
titling is, after all, an art with a specific and highly constrained function. The
important thing for us in Bass’s titles is the continuum that is manifested and
played out in literal time-based art, a continuum of rhetorical possibilities
and signifying strategies that cross and recross from graphic to linguistic
media and back, in evocative iterative performance, without ever losing a
grip on their specific materialities. It is, I argue here, a complex surface of
writing which provides underlying fundamental media for such trajectories.
FIGURE 6.3 Three stills from the opening titles, designed by Saul Bass, for North
by Northwest, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1959.
The ruled gridlines of North by Northwest and the complex surface they
literally delineate are faithful to graphics, typography, visuality, and textuality
all at once. As the sequence progresses this becomes clear. The words of
the title perform their function—we can simply read the credits—and they
give material pleasure in their design and movement. At a certain point the
grid moves away from abstraction and is filled in with the mirrored glass
windows of a modernist office block. It becomes real or rather more than
real because it is also a mirror, an inscribed surface that is also one particular
privileged representation of the world. We see people and traffic alive and
moving in the mirror-world and world of filmic naturalism. Meanwhile, the
title words continue to share this same surface. They are still well set and
respectful of typographic principles but now they share a surface of visual
representation that is simultaneously a real object (the building) in the (film)
world. It’s a tour de force. These titles embody an evolving continuum of
signifying strategies across media that could be performed only in time and
on a complex writing surface.
The potential emergence of the now-familiar screenic surface of
programmable media is prefigured in the titles for North by Northwest.8
Moreover, this prefiguration is unambiguously and necessarily complex,
contrasting with the actual historical development of computing’s screenic
writing surface, for which emulation of flatland paper became a misdirected
priority.
“Surfacing”: overboard and translation

Over the years, since the late 1970s, much of my own literary work in
programmable media has incorporated text that is algorithmically generated
in relation to composed or found given texts. Clearly, even in the simplest
of flatland terms, the given text and the generated text represent two states,
both of which require to be read and appreciated together in any critical
assessment of the work as a whole. Of necessity, the generated text will
include symbols and symbolic structures that derive from the given text.
It is possible, therefore, to see the generated text, in more than a merely
metaphoric sense, as a topological transformation of the given text, with its
traces providing clues to the way the textual surface has been reshaped. The
generated text is the given text rendered on a transformed surface, a surface
with at least one degree of further complexity.
The generation of a mesostic text, algorithmically or otherwise,
demonstrates this quite clearly. Emmett Williams, Jackson Mac Low, and
John Cage are all notable for their deployment of varieties of mesostics and
it was also a form that I programmed into pieces, in a number of variations.
In instances of mesostics, one or other given text will be, as it were, folded
into the generated text.9 Traversing the surface of the resulting symbolic
structure in a standard flatland reading invokes the recital of a generated,
programmatically ordered, but apparently unitary, text. However, traversing
the same surface according to different rules and procedures may allow the
given text to be recovered. One way of looking at this is to say the surface
of writing is complex and has more than one functioning dimensional
presentation. In one particular dimensional mode, the generated text is
legible, in another, the given text surfaces. Or one might conceive of it as an

example of the type of self-sameness that is found in the scaling of fractals.
Zoomed in, we read the generated text; zoomed out, we read the given
text.10
In programmatological instantiations of mesostic structures, these
traversals may be played out in (real) time. Traditionally we read this as
observing the production of the generated text or at least some unitary
fragment of the larger text (a screen-full). We wait for the process to begin
and then conclude, and we read the starting and the end states of the text.
However, if we reconceive the writing surface as complex, then we are
provided with a structure which can be seen to bear as well as perform the
temporal dimensions of the text. Let’s be clear, the point of this reconfigured
conception is to be able to reconceive the text as a complex, temporal object,
to fully appreciate textuality as time-based. I say that the writing surface is
complex. This allows us to perceive it as having more dimensions than the
usual two and also as having at least one temporal dimension. In fact, of
course, it is the writing and its particular structure that generates a particular
complex surface, rendering its specific dimensional complexities, whatever
they may be. In flatland, at best and in theory, writing renders itself and the
writing surface transparent. In the real world, writing produces surfaces of
arbitrary complexity and dimensionality, including dimensions of time.
Clear examples of the instantiation and performance of complex writing
surfaces are demonstrated in the two series of works I call overboard and
translation.11
The texts underlying these pieces are arranged with line and stanza breaks.
Each of the resulting verses may, independently, be in any one of three states
which I describe as floating, sinking, or surfacing. The names for these states
were chosen before I began to theorize the complexity of the writing surface,
but nonetheless, they are highly suggestive of what I am now attempting
to convey. If we think of the screenic surface as monitoring a “run-time
performance” of one of these pieces, the writing that is produced renders
this surface as complex. It becomes a manifold of many constituent surfaces
that shift and move as the given and generated texts shift and move. The
floating metaphors suggest that we might think of this as like the surface
of the sea, deformed by interfering wave patterns. The texts are particular
patterns of ever-shifting wave-deformed surfaces. Where the surfaces touch,
literal writing appears. As waves rise and fall and where the surfaces no
longer touch, writing disappears.
In overboard, the surfaces of the text are deformed by functions relating
to legibility (Figure 6.4). That is—continuing with our metaphor—the
“wave-pattern” of a verse will be determined in relation to legibility. In
a “surfacing” state, literal points (points on the surface where letters may
appear) will tend to “rise” and touch the screenic surface of visibility such
that it will spell out the underlying given text. In a “sinking” state they will
FIGURE 6.4 Screenshot from overboard. Courtesy of the author.
tend to recede from the surface of visibility. In the “floating” state they may
be algorithmically transformed so as to appear on the visible surface in an
alternate literal form, producing a quasi-legibility, a linguistic shimmering
on the screenic reading surface.
Translation deploys similar algorithms but introduces further
complexities, demonstrating the contention that the surface of writing may
be arbitrarily complex (Figure 6.5). In translation, the wave-patterns of
textual surfaces may be deformed by literal functions relating different texts
to one another, specifically texts in different languages. If a text floats or
sinks in one language, it may surface in another.
As they run and perform, pieces from the overboard and translation
series are what they appear to be—ever-changing, ambient manifestations
of writing on complex surfaces. Neither overboard nor translation can be
read or appreciated as flatland literary broadsheets.
Complex surfaces on the Cave walls

My work in writing for programmable media has, in a number of instances,
involved designing and implementing a conceptual topology for textual
FIGURE 6.5 Screenshot from translation. Courtesy of the author.
structures. Specifically, I have recognized that the programmability of both

compositional and delivery media allows for the disposition of texts in an
ordered manner such that, for example, media can represent structural
interrelationships between the texts, and that such an arrangement may
be most easily figured as spatial. As indicated above, this spatiality can be
understood as the material instantiation of the critical notion of “depth.” I
conceive depth as emergent from the complexity of writing surfaces. When
I came to make work in an immersive virtual-reality Cave, there was an
obvious first step to make: use the Cave’s immersive 3D graphics to delineate
a topology, a shaped space in which text is systematically disposed.12 In
this unusual, artificial, programmatologically generated environment, the
surface of a text can be literally, visibly shown to be arbitrarily complex.
A unitary textual object may subsist, suspended in virtual space, with a
manifold of interrelated writing and reading surfaces.
Rather than attempt to describe in any detail one or other Cave-based
project, in this section, I aim to outline a particular example of the complexity
of literal surfaces, one that emerged as a discovery and that could only,
perhaps, have been recognized and appreciated in the Cave environment.
There was a known anomaly in the graphics system of the Cave software,
not really a bug, but more a matter of a default configuration in rendering
that produces counter-intuitive visual effects. The effect of this anomaly
was that, in certain contexts, the surfaces of conceptually and perspectivally
distant objects in the Cave are rendered over the surfaces of closer objects in
terms of transparency/opacity. If letters were all rendered in the same surface
color with no lighting effects or without anti-aliasing or similar sophisticated
edge rendering techniques, then this “bug” would not necessarily have been
noticeable. However, even a smaller, conceptually more “distant” white
letter rendered “over” a larger, “closer” white letter will, in practice, be
visible because its edges are made visible by the graphics engine’s subtleties.
In the graphics “world” of the textual objects I developed for the Cave,
letters have no thickness, but they pivot in three dimensions so as always to
face the primary, tracked point of view (the Cave’s single dominant point
of view, associated with one privileged viewer within the Cave-space). If the
tracked reader is positioned at the edge of a plane of letters and she turns
to face the plane edge-on, the letters will all turn to face her. Their images
overlap, occlude one another—partially or wholly—and recede in view, since
the majority of them will be successively more or less distant. “Normally”
the surfaces of the larger closer letters would cover the more distant smaller
letters. However, because of the anomaly, smaller letter outlines may be
clearly discernable “within” but “over” the formed surfaces of the nearer
letters. Given these circumstances, and because, I believe, all the letter forms
are familiar—both visually and symbolically legible—and because we know
what their relative scale “should be,” this produces a striking and somewhat
bizarre visual illusion (Figure 6.6). We assume that even though the smaller
letters are rendered “over” the larger ones, they must be more distant (as
in fact they are in the conceptual topology). Thus, what we see is a very
deep and narrow corridor formed from letter shapes, with the most distant
smallest letters visible in completely edged outline, apparently farthest off,
as if inscribed on a tall, thin distant end of the corridor. Moreover, the reader
is able to move “into” the corridor formed by this plane of letter shapes.
This powerful perceptual experience is demonstrable and repeatable,
despite its artificiality and strangeness.13
This rendering anomaly was exploited and highlighted in a distinct study
piece called Lens. Versions have been made in the Cave—where the concepts
are more fully realized—and as also as a transactive QuickTime maquette.14
If different, contrasting colored letters are used for texts on distinct
surfaces, the rendering anomaly plays out differently. As expected, “distant”
letters will render over closer ones in the anomalous configuration. If the
distant letters in question are dark in color and the nearer letters light,
then, effectively, the surfaces of the nearer letters are transformed, by the
anomalous rendering, into surfaces of inscription for the distant letters. If
the overall background color is dark (black by default, as in the existing
Cave version and also the present QuickTime maquette), this has a further
effect relating to legibility and strategies of reading. Dark and distant letters
on a dark background are difficult to read. On a lighter background, they
may suddenly become legible. If the lighter background happens also to
FIGURE 6.6 Photograph from an immersive digital language art piece, taken in
the Brown University Cave, showing the anomalous “corridor” effect produced by
layered letters with disordered transparencies. Courtesy of the author.
be the surface of a letter that otherwise seems to be perceptually close to

the reader (it is closer in the conceptual topology of the graphic world),
a strange counter-intuitive effect is produced when the dark letters stray
into the region of light—a literal surface becomes a surface for inscription/
reading and the spatial relations between the textual surfaces are inverted
by the suddenly predominant desire to read (Figure 6.7). The surface of the
nearer letter may also, as we shall see, become a full-blown 3D space within
which the more distant letters appear to be disposed.
In the QuickTime maquette, which uses no actual 3D rendering and in
which illusory visual distance is represented only by the sizes of its various
texts, these effects can nonetheless be demonstrated. “Distant” texts—two
dark- and two light-colored—rift in the screen’s blackness. There is also, at
first, a “lens” word rendered in larger white letters. The reader can move
this “lens” by dragging and scale it using command keys. If the lens itself is
zoomed-in so as to become (illegibly) large, the surfaces of one or other of its
constituent letters can then be used as a reading surface for the more distant
darker texts, and this makes them suddenly legible, as well as subverting our
assumptions about their relative distance.
FIGURE 6.7 Photograph from an immersive digital language art piece, taken in the
Brown University Cave, showing linguistically implicated layering effects. Courtesy
of the author.
In the Cave version of Lens, the effects are far more striking, disturbing,
and spectacular. The letters of Lens obey previously cited rules so that their
surfaces turn toward the tracked point of view, and the textual objects in the
piece are fully 3D as is the space itself. The lens text can be moved in relation
to the reader’s point of view, drawn close or sent out among the distant
darker texts, like an investigative spotlight. Most spectacularly, because of
the immersive characteristics of the Cave system, the literal surface of the
lens’s letters can be, as it were, moved so close as to touch or pass “behind”
the reader’s body and point of view. The surface light of a lens letter can
even be brought into the very eyes of the reader. When this happens, the
reader’s vision seems to be flooded with the white light of this literal surface
and the most spectacular spatial inversion/subversion occurs. The whiteness
becomes a 3D space. In fact, it becomes the enclosing 3D space of the Cave,
taking the place of the dark space previously inhabited by both reader and
the various textual objects only a moment before. The distant dark blue
texts still drift in this space, but now they do so, distinct and legible, in a
space of light and clarity. If the reader then moves the surface-literal lens-
light “out” of her eyes, the enclosing space, as suddenly, reverts to darkness.
It seems clear that this relatively simple system makes literal, in virtual
space, a particular type of complex surface that has spectacular perceptual
affect and a degree of rhetorical potential. As a proof of concept, it is
striking. In so far as it “works” it does so in terms of the complex, recursive
interrelations of writing surfaces and surfaces that are, literally, formed by
writing, at least in so far as the graphic surfaces of letters are “formed by
writing.” However, except in the sense of writing as graphic form, there is
no immediate or necessary determination of any symbolic content of writing
in Lens by its formal complexities of surface. The relationship between a
particular letter’s surface and the “distant” text it allows to be read is not
expressed as a linguistic or even a quasi-linguistic function. Contrast a typical
mesostic text or the texts of overboard and translation, where the shifting
states of complex reading and writing surfaces are determined by functions
applied to their constituent symbolic “contents.” Rather, Lens shares some
of the characteristics of surface complexity in Saul Bass’s cinematic titles.
The play of complex surfaces produces effects in the visual imaginary and
in our notions of the “real,” in the sense of the worlds we feel ourselves to
inhabit. In Saul Bass’s work the writing surface enters the imagined visual
world of film and shows that the surfaces of that world may be inscribed. In
the Cave, we can “really” dwell within the text. Its surface complexities may
suddenly determine where we are, how we see what we see, and what we
can or cannot read in a “world” that is literally made of text.
The symbolic on complex surfaces

Retallack wrote, “The symbolic is always […] a flatland in its relation to
the complex real.” In a world of letters dominated by paper, print, and
their hypernetworked emulations, it is hard to dispute this contention.
And yet, in their specific context, these words dispute themselves. They are,
unambiguously, extracted from a writing project that is made from language.
It is self-consciously poetic and it demands a poethics. It is engaged, at one
and the same time, with the symbolic and the complex real. In so far as
Retallack’s words are effective in this context, they turn on themselves,
producing a fold in their own writing surface and demonstrating that
flatland sentences may generate surface complexities that are continuous,
fractally, as Retallack would say, with art and life. I hope to have indicated
above that programmable media provide arbitrarily numerous means to
realize, in program and performance, complex relationships between the
symbolic realm of language and the world it dwells within, represents, and
constitutes. To achieve this, we require a textuality of complex surfaces,
capable of conveying a multidimensionality that is commensurate with lived
human experience, including the structured culture of human time.
7
Time Code Language: New
Media Poetics and Programmed
Signification
One of the defining characteristics of poetic writing is its attention to the

materiality of language, which has become an important critical concept
in literary studies. We speak of “the materiality of text” or “the materiality
of language” in general, as if this might be an abstract characteristic when,
in fact, it is the critical marker of linguistic and literary embodiment,
recognizable only in terms of that embodiment. As N. Katherine Hayles
puts it, “The materiality of an embodied text is the interaction of its physical
characteristics with its signifying strategies.”1 The presence and operation
of code is, in many, though not all, instances, a significant part of the
complex physical makeup of electronic text and is often a sine qua non
for the operation of its signifying strategies. In so far as we are interested
in identifying and defining certain specific aspects of the materiality of
language that are foregrounded by writing in networked and programmable
media, we are called to pay close attention to the role of code and coding in
this type of work. We must keep asking ourselves, what is code? What is the
relationship of code and text in cultural objects that are classified as literary
and that are explicitly programmed?
The context of this chapter is current and continuing discussion which
addresses these questions. It refers implicitly and explicitly to other critical
interventions that have begun to identify a genre of electronically mediated
writing as “codework.” According to Rita Raley, “Broadly, codework makes
exterior the interior workings of the computer.”2 Code is indeed an archive
of the symbolic inner workings of the computer. However, not only is it
brought to the surface in the writing of new media, it may function to
generate the language displayed on this surface, without itself appearing.
In an earlier piece of mine, a prequel to this chapter, I argue that we must
be more articulate about the distinctions we make between code and text.3
These distinctions are creatively challenged by codework that brings “inner
workings” to an “exterior,” especially when such work is manifested as a
generative cross-infection of text and code-as-text, of language and code-
as-language. In this earlier piece, I argued that “the code is not the text,
unless it is the text.” Code that is not the text, code that remains unbroken
and operative, may instantiate—as durational performance—the signifying
strategies of a text. As such, it does not appear on the complex surface of the
interface text as part of or as identical with it. There are, therefore, further
distinctions within codework, between those works that bring the traces of
an interior archive of code into the open, and those works that depend on
the continuing operation of code, where the code, in fact, reconceals itself
by generating a complex surface “over” itself. The present chapter addresses
these distinctions and then takes on questions concerning the characteristics
of a textuality whose very atoms of signification are programmed. What is
textuality where it is composed from programmed signifiers? In particular,
the temporal properties of such signifiers are highlighted, and the significance
of this temporality is examined.
Literal performance literal process

Clearly, it is difficult to articulate and share a detailed, nuanced conception of
what we do—how we perform and process—as we write and read and play
with language. Out of our difficulties entire fields of critical thought emerge.
I begin, for example, to use words to refer, provisionally, to phenomena,
like words, which I assume have some kind of separate, atomic existence,
however provisional or temporary. Word as word (re)presentation refers to
word as thing (re)presentation. The implicit atomism—treating something
as irreducible in order to try to assay its significance and affect—is always
provisional, even where established by lexical authority, and is ever mobile.
At one instant I refer to some word-sized atom of language, the next instant
another, then, as suddenly, I recompile and shift “upward”—many levels in
the hierarchies of code and language—and refer to the specific work or to
“text” itself, which suddenly becomes not only a conceptual automaton in
our minds but also an atom of linguistic matter in my discourse itself, even
though my discourse is, as it were, contained within its significance.
Foregrounded in this way, the procedural, performative nature of the literal
is demonstrable. Despite your understanding that, for example, these words
are inscribed as writing—temporally stunned, deferred, and spatialized—
you will sense words shifting their meanings as I write/speak and you read/
hear. No matter how little attention you or I pay to what is going on as we
process, it is easy to concede that, for example, the meanings of words like
TIME CODE LANGUAGE 97
“code” and “text” change during the shifting “now”—the distinct present
moments as I write and you read—and may well change radically over the
course of my intermittent writing/speaking and your intermittent reading/
hearing. The generation of altered and new meaning is, after all, one of my
explicit aims in addressing these terms.
It follows, even from this simple, on-the-fly phenomenology of language,
that atoms or instances of language (of whatever extent), though we treat
them as “things,” are, in fact, processes. If they are ever static or thing-
like, they are more like the “states” of a system, provisionally recognized
as identifiable, designated entities. In themselves they are, if anything, more
similar to programmed, procedural loops of significance and affect, isolated
for strategic or tactical reasons, be they rhetorical, aesthetic, social, or
political. This characterization is good linguistics and good critical thought.
However, usually our perception and appreciation of linguistic and critical
process are more broadly focused, bracketing the micro-processes that
generate and influence significance and affect in the “times” taken to move
from statement to statement, let alone those which pass so fleetingly and
function so invisibly in the move from letter to letter.
Moreover, as Hayles demonstrates in her recent critique of prevailing
notions of textuality, an abstracted conception of both “the text” (a physical
and literal manifestation of the ideal object of textual criticism, more or
less identified with an author’s intended work) and “text” (as a general
concept), is allied to the apparent stasis and persistence of print, and still
dominates our understanding of textuality in literary criticism.4 By contrast,
for Hayles all texts are embodied in specific media. In her view, electronic
texts represent a mode of embodiment through which literary works are
able to perform a realization of a latent materiality, and perhaps also the
revelation of such texts’ present and future informatic post-humanity, where
they “thrive on the entwining of physicality with informational structure.”5
Hayles sets out some of the elements of an electronic text and emphasizes
the dynamism of their symbolic relationships:
There are data files, programs that call and process the files, hardware
functionalities that interpret or compile the programs, and so on. It takes
all of these together to produce the electronic text. Omit any one of them,
and the text literally cannot be produced. For this reason, it would be
more accurate to call an electronic text a process rather than an object.6
Such a text, unlike that which has print for its medium, has no materially
accessible existence prior to its generation when displayed on the screen:
“electronic textuality … cannot be separated from the delivery vehicles that
produce it as a process with which the user can interact.”7
For an object to be identified as a process, at the very least, there must be
some way for its state to change over time, and perhaps also the possibility of
enumerating the temporal sequence of such states, or some way to describe

a procedure or procedures that generate the states and changes of state in
the object. In other words, there have to be programs to be followed, to be
run. In Hayles’s analysis, however, the programming seems to reside chiefly
in the delivery media of electronic textuality—the “data files, programs
that call and process the files, hardware functionalities, and so on”—rather
than operating from within the text itself, the text of interpretation.8 In
earlier essays she has described and characterized a “flickering signifier”
in digital textuality, but this flickering of signification is a function of the
same peripheral processing of text and its image—both screen image and
underlying encoded representations. Where the flickering is indicative of
depth—like ripples on the surface of a lake—this is a function of code in
the sense of encoding.9 We imagine depths behind the screen, within the
box, underneath the keyboard, because we know that the surface text is
multiply encoded in order that it can be manipulated at the many and
various levels of software and hardware. However, much of this underlying
programmatological manipulation is typically treated as insignificant for
the purposes of interpretation. I know that the screens of text that I read
are being ceaselessly refreshed with, perhaps, some subliminal perceptual
flickering of their signifiers, but I do not necessarily read this process as
part of what is being signified to me. Unless foregrounded by an author for
particular rhetorical effects, the programmatological dimensions of screen
rasterization, for example, do not play a direct role in the generation of
significance or affect.
This is by no means to say that flickering signification does not operate
in a poetics of new media. I believe that this phenomenon is crucial to both
the theory and practice of literal art in programmable media and is generally
applicable to textuality, including that of traditional media such as print.10
My present purpose, however, is to try to address the role of procedures that
do directly affect rhetoric and poetics, to identify the subjects and objects of
programming within discussions of code and coding, in so far as they inflect
our understanding of writing and the performance of writing.
Five ways to write “code”

I have already suggested one source of possible misdirection concerning the
relationship of code and signification. The debate is set out under the rubric
of “codework” without fully articulating the ambiguities in the use of the
term “code” itself. Thus Hayles, for example, concentrates on the role of
“code” as encoding in signification, with “code” as operative programming
implicitly consigned to the hardware and software periphery. Raley’s minimal
characterization—“Broadly, codework makes exterior the interior workings
of the computer”—evokes both encoding and programming aspects of

code(work) since they are typically interior in her sense.11 Raley goes on
to suggest further distinctions in codework as identified by a prominent
codework practitioner, Alan Sondheim:
Works using the syntactical interplay of surface language; Works in

which the submerged content has modified the surface language; Works
in which the submerged content is emergent content.12
However, Sondheim’s set of distinctions does not evoke code as programming

per se, and it remains focused on a written surface, however complex. It
refers to the inscribed surface and what emerges from code into and through
it. In order to help clarify the various ways that “code” is used in discussions
of codework, I offer five provisional categories:
1. Code as (a special type of) language (viewed and interpreted as such)

2. Code as infecting or modulating natural language (the language
works, but the code is “broken”)
3. Code as text to be read as (if it were) natural language; code which
is infected or modulated by natural language (the code works, but
the language is “broken”)
4. Code as system of correspondences, as encoding
5. Code as programming, as a program or set of methods that runs (in
time) and produces writing, or that is necessary for the production
of writing.
The first three categories characterize texts according to properties of the

constituent language. The texts are viewed as interface texts to be read in a
fairly traditional manner. The language has been composed and laid out—in
any number of complex contexts, including of course the online, shifting
context of the web—and then it is read and interpreted. These categories
cover the majority of literal art production which goes under this new rubric
of “codework.”
Code as language in itself and in its own terms, category one, is something
of a specialist study, and its full critical appreciation is as much the concern
of computer scientists as literary critics. Nonetheless, writers such as Loss
Pequeño Glazier seriously address code in its own terms as a potential poetry,
not simply as linguistic fodder for the most common type of codework, the
second category, where code infects or modulates natural language.13 This
second type of code-infected writing, epitomized in many ways by the work
of Mez, is widely practiced and represents not much more than the extension
of the long-standing enrichment of natural language which occurs whenever
history or sociology produces an encounter between linguistic cultures and
subcultures.14 My previous chapter on codework critiques this mode of

writing, not least by comparing it to the encounters which occur between
commensurate human languages. Codework comes off somewhat badly
from the comparison, because code is a jargon or sublinguistic structure,
not a full-blown, culture-supporting language. An encounter between, for
example, English and Unix, is, in a sense, an encounter between a language
and some smaller part of itself, rather than with an alien and commensurate
linguistic entity.15 It is also the case with code-infected interface text that
the code is, in the programmer’s sense, “broken” after its incorporation into
the text we read. It has lost its operative, performative “power” in the very
instant that it is brought to the surface of interpretation.16 What of the code
that remains hidden, which may well be operating as we read? This is the
code that I want to read more critically.
Category three, codework that is manifest as written code, presented and
intended to be read by non-specialist human readers—those who are not
programmers and not, as it were, “manual” compilers or interpreters—is
a special case and is less common. “Perl poetry” is a genre known mainly
to programmers and hackers. In my earlier chapter, I described examples,
citing work by Jodi and Cosic, as well as one of my own experiments. In
this type of writing the code may be functional and unbroken (although
not functioning as it is read). However, in most instances, natural language
elements are introduced (in a way that allows the code to remain functional)
or cultural framing is provided which renders the code readable—significant
and affective—for humans. In a manner complementary to the conditions
pertaining to code-infected language, the human cultural elements tend to
be “broken” or at least heavily constrained in these forms.
Thus, the codework categorized according to my first three usages of
“code” produces texts to be read, interface texts subject to interpretation by
readers. The code is not running to generate the text; nor is it significantly
present in the text in such a way that might alter or inflect the manner of
reading. Code is not functioning to address writing as a formal procedure in
these cases; it is not involved with the form and matter of the language used,
although it is, clearly, making a contribution to its content. The language
of code is visible on the surface of the interface text, but code has not
necessarily been present at the scene of writing.
As we come to consider encoding—my fourth category—as an aspect of
writing in programmable media, code does begin to emerge as integral to
the material of the language used, necessary for its properties and methods,
although, I argue, this aspect of code is still not fully indicative of its
potential role in the active and continuing modulation of signification or as
an engine for new literal and literary rhetoric in new media.17 As we have
already seen, Hayles’s flickering signifier acquires much of its conceptual
power from the depths and layers of encoding it allows us to discover and
recover in programmatological systems. It is clearly demonstrable that text,
stored and displayed in digital media, is multiply encoded, and awareness

of this circumstance is certainly significant for our understanding of the
materiality of language in new media. However, this is not an entirely new
conception of textuality. The idea that the signifier is multilayered—with
shifting and floating relationships of correspondence between the layers—is
well known and widely accepted in criticism. Famously, Barthes (as Hayles
acknowledges) brought our attention to the layered underlying semiotic
codes prevalent even in readerly texts.18 He showed how elements of the
interface text might instantiate and evoke many and various instances of the
corresponding codes simultaneously. Moreover, and by contrast with the
sense of code initiated by Barthes, the type of encoding highlighted by the
flickering of Hayles’ digital signifiers is, in one sense, largely sublinguistic, or
on the outer margins of paratext. Although we can be made aware that the
codes of digital media make words we read on screen flicker beneath it, we
do not really care—for the purposes of interpretation—whether the text we
read is encoded as extended ASCII or Unicode.
Finally, this type of relationship is simultaneous or synchronous. The
flickering is a sign of a synchronic correspondence. The flickering may only
be apparent in brief moments of time but, significantly, the relationships do
not function temporally, nor are they modulated by time. This simultaneity
of encoded correspondences is crucial, I believe, to the distinction between,
on the one hand, code as encoding, and, on the other, code as the archive of
functional programming. We have to distinguish between: (1) flickering as a
function of the chained hierarchies of codes and language where the signifier
flickers because it is reducible to something else which flickers; for example:
the work, a text, is persistent on the screen but I know that it flickers because
I know that the screen refreshes and because the keyboard is waiting for
new input or because some paratextual procedure is being applied to the
word image (e.g., changing its font and color); and (2) flickering because the
signifier or chain of signifiers is produced by code and because the signifier
may itself be programmed.
At this point, I am beginning to discuss code as operational programming
in textuality, my fifth category. My aim is to distinguish the characteristics
of textuality that incorporates (or is the subject of) code in this sense. This
“strong sense” code is integral to all textuality, although it might be objected
that this claim would be hard to substantiate before the historical advent of
demonstrably programmable media. There have always been programs, I
would answer, and these programs are a necessary aspect of the materiality
of language—an ever-present aspect of mediation between a text’s physical
characteristics and its signifying strategies. The difference lies in where—
literally, and also within cultural structures and hierarchies—these programs
run, and it also depends on who writes and runs them. There is a continuity
from what I will call “paratextual programming” and the kind of programming
that is ever more familiar from the proliferation of programmable media.
Paratextual programming runs quasi-invisibly within traditional structures

of writing, reading, and interpretation. The programmatological dimension
of writing has always already been operative, and therefore, the traditional
temporally stunned conception of textuality has always already been
inadequate to literary and especially to poetic practice. However, the coding
applied to textuality in new media allows us to perceive, if not the coding
itself, then the unambiguous effects and consequences of that coding.
Punctuation colon programming

To demonstrate a continuity between paratextual programming and
programming proper we can work with an example, a sentence within a
paragraph at the beginning of this chapter. By paratextual programming I
mean the (integral) aspects of inscription which frame or infect or undermine
or position the text to be read, that is, the interface text. I use “paratext” in the
sense of Genette, but I am highlighting its programmatological dimension.19
In contrast to “strong sense” coding or programming, paratextual
programming becomes a perceptible part of the interface text—it appears
on the same surface, often using the same symbol set (although as often
employing the tropes and figures of non-linguistic media)—whereas coding
per se remains invisible and inaccessible. In fact, “codework” in the sense of
the instantiation of code-infected interface text (typically my category two)
can be seen as paratextual programming using what is also occasionally
referred to as postmodern punctuation. Raley calls this—approaching even
closer to the textuality of programmable media—“punctuation particular
to the apparatus” and cites one of the prime current practitioners of the art:
“Talan Memmott calls this set of punctuations ‘technical ideogrammatics.’”20
Even writing punctuated in a manner that is “particular to the apparatus”
can be quoted, unpacked, analyzed, and stunned to paraphrase, as writing in
general or in traditionally recognized forms. As promised, I will demonstrate
what I mean with a simple example, from a piece of language I have
already used, “Word as word (re)presentation refers to word as thing (re)
presentation.” Obviously, the visible marks of paratextual programming
here are the parentheses. The primary specific intended effect of the
parentheses is to provide a double reading, at once poststructural—through
the evocation of the word “representation” and through the use of the
parenthesis themselves putting presence/absence of a signifier into play, and
also Freudian—through the implicit use of his phrases “word presentation”
and “thing presentation.”21 What the punctuation does is set up a time-
based revision of the atomic meanings of and within the sentence. I can, as
I have done, recast these meanings and map them to a paraphrase based on
the traces and marks in the interface text itself. This recasting is a process in
itself, separate from the surface language of the interface text but archived
within it. Its implicit “code” evokes a widely used and well-understood
rhetorical and interpretative “program,” the program of paraphrase. In this
light, paraphrase can be seen as nothing other than the simplified (proper)
naming of procedural loops within more complex language that we so name
in order to be able to identify and atomize their procedures of meaning-
generation for the purpose of re-articulation. Any text where codes and
the codes of punctuation are integrated with the interface text, including
much of the codework of Mez and of Talan Memmott, can be unpacked and
analyzed in these terms, as inflected and driven by paratextual programming.
Hypertextual dissolutions
Spatially organized, navigable texts can often be understood in the same
way, where precisely the spatial organization and navigation is to be read
as paraphrase, gloss, elaboration, annotation, and so on, all coded into
operations that produce a successively revealed interface text. Making
reference to spatially organized, navigable textuality immediately evokes
hypertext. Indeed, hypertext does, for me, occupy a transitional or
intermediate position between the textuality of what I have called paratextual
programming exemplified in a postmodern punctuation of print text and a
textuality that is generated by programs or that is itself programmed. For
Philippe Bootz hypertext is simply the application of an operator to a literary
dataspace.22 In Bootz’s theory, “the Procedural Model,” the application of
a hypertext operator or class of operations to a proto-“hypertext” is what
generates nodes and links while, at the same time, coding those methods
and commands that enable what we call navigation into the hypertextual
structure. For Bootz, it is important to see that the hypertextual operator
is simply one of a virtually infinite number of such operators that might
be applied to the literary dataspace, the proto-hypertext that would in
fact become something quite other than hypertext if different operators
were applied. It is also noteworthy that the procedures and programming
of hypertext are relatively simple—the response to a set of documentary
problems rather than to poetic or, indeed, narrative ones.23 As famously
discussed on the relevant internet lists in the late 1990s, there seems to be
little content “inside” the links of traditional hypertext.24 Hypertext took
the spatialization of text beyond print media and brought the trope of
navigation to prominence, but the composed language of its constituent
nodes or lexia retained the print-like quality of having been impressed
on a surface—discoverable, visitable, but with little programmatological
“depth.” The classic hypertextual link does little other than provide the
instantaneous replacement of one composed fragment of integral text by
another. At times, this process is not appreciable, even metaphorically, as
a spatial displacement. How is the replacement of text on the surface of a
unitary screen more of a spatial displacement than, for example, turning to a

place—figuratively, literally, and physically—“further on” or “deeper into”
or “at the back of” a book? The programming involved in hypertext seems
relatively shallow and more closely allied with paratext and textual framing
than with the potentialities I have it in mind to address.
Overriding the “read” method: Rosenberg’s

programmed signifiers
Discussion of hypertext leads us to the work of Jim Rosenberg, which provides
a further transitional demonstration of code operative in and through
language, a crucial and interesting point of intersection of paratextual and
strong-sense, fifth-category codework. Rosenberg explicitly contextualizes his
practice within and against the traditional study and theory of hypertext, and
yet his work is difficult to reconcile with classic link-node models of hypertext.
On the one hand the actual coding in his work is, arguably, simpler than
the implementation of a hypertext operator. In pieces such as Rosenberg’s
Intergrams, Diffractions Through, and The Barrier Frames, his actual coding
produces little more than the substitution of successive screen images showing
texts, syntactic diagrams (in most cases), and textual frames in response to the
position of a mouse or other pointing device.25 On the other hand, Rosenberg
has built elaborate, articulated relationships into the language and linguistic
structures of the texts which are handled by his actual code, such that the
positioning of the pointer—part of the work of the reader—becomes a device
that reveals the programmatological dimension of his work.
It seems to me to be crucial to Rosenberg’s work that often when the
mouse or pointing device is not in contact with an area containing or
enclosing text, the visual field of the work is unreadable, or, more precisely,
its constitutive texts are unreadable. In these states of the work (one might
call them “rest” states), the reader is initially presented with “zoomed out”
diagrams outlining large-scale syntactic relationship between areas of text
(which are shown as graphic “representations of writing” rather than
writing per se, Figure 7.1). If the reader “zooms in” on one of these areas,
such that it fills the visual field and constitutes a new phase of the interface
text, the words displayed on the screen (in the “rest state” of a zoomed-
in assemblage) are still unreadable but for different reasons (Figure 7.2).
Rosenberg typically composes his texts in overlaid clusters that together
are dense enough to make reading the constituent layers impossible. It is
precisely the movement of the mouse that brings one or another layer to
the reading surface where it then becomes readable (while covering the
other layers) (Figure 7.3). Move the mouse away and the work returns to an
unreadable rest state.
FIGURE 7.1 Screenshot from The Barrier Frames. Courtesy of Jim Rosenberg.
FIGURE 7.2 Screenshot from Intergrams. Courtesy of Jim Rosenberg.

FIGURE 7.3 Screenshot from Intergrams. Courtesy of Jim Rosenberg.
Work like Rosenberg’s, implemented with very simple coding, nonetheless

requires its coding—as a specific part of its materiality and in order to
realize its signifying strategies—to a far greater degree than in the case of the
generality of link-node hypertext, for example. This can be demonstrated
in the most simple and direct terms when we say that Rosenberg’s work is
unreadable, it cannot be read, unless its underlying codes—the ones that
reveal the constituent layers—are running in a waiting state, ready to be
evoked. Of course, the entirety of a hypertext also requires that its various
links are activated and followed in order for it to be read as a whole, but its
constituent nodes are, typically, readable as texts in the hypertext’s “rest”
state. A hypertext, classically, does not require the constant, active invocation
of the codes that manage its links for textual reading to at least proceed.26
In fact, of course, all reading requires the constant and active invocation
of codes and coding, in the mind, for it to proceed. No reading takes place
without a process of reading. It is simply that print literacy tends to bracket
the temporal and programmatological dimension of both writing and
reading, or reduce it either to an inscribed spatiality of ideal, fixed editions,
or to linearity, which is its all but invisible fundamental temporal structure,
a structuring of time so straightforward that, when recorded as writing,
we tend to think of the text as a line (resting) in space.27 The materiality of
Rosenberg’s work resists these reductions in the most obvious and effective
way. When his work is space, it is not readable, and it has no emergent,
repeatable linearity. Only within restructured time can it be read. Moreover,
even less than in the case of hypertext can it be reduced to linearity. Without
being indeterminate (Rosenberg’s texts are not generated by quasi-random
processes), these texts are nonetheless constructed in a manner that makes
it next to impossible for writer or reader to anticipate or control the mouse
or pointer’s positions when addressing the work in a way that would allow,
for example, the repeated performance of particular sequences of textual
revelations. It would be impossible, that is, without learning to manipulate
one of his works like a musical instrument, gaining the necessary control and
skill to know which “notes” to strike and when. The point is: the reading, or
recital, of one of Rosenberg’s texts obliges its readers to address the inherent
restructuring of time, specifically the time of reading. Rosenberg’s coding
of programmable media for literal art guarantees this specific aspect of his
text’s materiality and also, perhaps even more importantly, gives both writer
and reader access to the manipulation of this dimension of literal textual
matter.28
In Rosenberg’s work the coding is in the system, but it is also within,
and a part of, the writing because of the way the text must be read, because
of the simple fact that the only way to read is by working with the text,
manipulating it with a programmaton’s pointing device. Rosenberg has
recast reading and has changed the properties and methods of the signifier.
He instantiates a signifier that has radically different properties to that of
print culture. One way of figuring this difference is to extend an analogy
with object-oriented programming and say that Rosenberg has extended the
class “Text” and overridden its “read” and “write” methods. In Rosenberg,
writing is (among other things) a method of layering, overlaying, and
compositing texts, and reading is (among other things) a tentative work of
revealing the clustered layers in order to pass the literal data they contain
on to the “read” method of an underlying or parallel Text object of the
“parent” class, the Text object of print culture.29
While we want to emphasize the fact that the signifier is a temporal,
durational object, we also have to consider that literal and literary time
is itself restructured by textuality. Textuality is temporal and as such
restructures the culture of human time. That textuality was always temporal
is clear. We are familiar with the textual generation of linear and narrative
time. We are familiar with writing as deferral, especially as a function of
its spatiality, its translation of time into space. We are comfortable with
the figures and tricks of narrative reordering—flashback and the like—
although chiefly in the frameworks of historical time and narrative drive.30
However, textuality as instantiated in programmable media realizes the
potential for a more radical restructuring of the culture of human time, and
Rosenberg’s literal art provides an instance of how this happens through
the absolute necessity to work with it, in time, in order to read.31 It is, in
this sense, a (if not “the”) type of “ergodic literature,” where non-trivial
effort is necessary for reading.32 However, as Espen Aarseth shows with his
provisional “textonomy,” time enters into the art of letters and is restructured
through many other rhetorical methods and procedures, not only through
ergodic manipulation, but also—giving a far from exhaustive list—through
animation, text generation, quasi- and pseudo-random modulation, and
various combinations of all of these, not to mention the kind of live textual
collaboration that networked programmable media allow.
Text in the docuverse

Rosenberg’s marked and continuing investment in hypertext per se invites us
to re-examine the claim—much touted in the hypertextual “golden age”—
that textuality gives way to hypertextuality in new media.33 Rosenberg sees
his work in terms of hypertext and is an active participant in the research
community associated with both the technical and theoretical development
of hypertext. When viewed from the perspective of computer science (or
computer science in the service of the humanities), as a system implemented
in software, “hypertext” has both a more precise meaning and also a range
of ever-evolving meanings closely dependent on the changing capabilities
of actually existing systems. Thus, the web is a variety of hypertext—
providing nodes, links, and navigation—but the basic capabilities of
HTML in the standard server-browser implementation are severely limited
when compared with more developed hypertext systems or speculative
structures.34 Many hypertext theorists and researchers—including and
perhaps especially Ted Nelson—would say that the web falls short of even
the fundamental requirements for a properly hypertextual system. I am not
so much interested in explaining or elaborating these technical distinctions.
Still, I want to consider the implications of the proposition that Rosenberg
sees his work, his literary objects, as reducible to hypertext, and I want to
do this in relation to a theory of hypertext that is particularly “totalizing”—
Nelson’s vision of the docuverse.
This chapter provides context for a re-examination of Nelson’s vision in
terms of my arguments concerning the poetics and the temporal materiality
of textual art in new media. More specifically, I am discussing programmed
signification—strategies of signification in Hayles’ terms—in which codes
and coding operate to generate or modulate texts, substantively. The attempt
to reconcile such strategies with Nelsonian hypertext yields, I believe, crucial
perspectives on both hypertext and the materiality of textual art. Nelson
is a visionary theorist particularly sensitive to text as “evolving, Protean
structure”35 and yet, paradoxically, his docuverse—along with the properties
and methods of its Xanadu system—is not only “the original (perhaps the
ultimate) HYPERTEXT SYSTEM”36 but also the final instantiation of the
textual materiality of authorized editions, of the ideal, abstracted, persistent,
authorized text that is currently the dominant object of attention in both
literary and academic discourse.
For Nelson “a document is really (Figure 7.4 appears here in his text)
an evolving ONGOING BRAID.”37 This definition accords perfectly with a
materiality of text for which structured durations of time are necessary to
its strategies of signification. Nelson’s system also specifies and provides a
way to view text in various successive states that arise during the spiraling,
branching process of composition, “instantaneous slices” captured from the
evolving braid as “versions” of the text or some part of the text. For Nelson,
a text very much has a history as well as a synchronous existence, and his
rendition of hypertext aims to represent this chronological dimension and
to do so well. However, his nodes are time-stamped not time-based, as in the
phrase “time-based art.” The docuverse captures states of the looping and
spiraling braids of textuality, but not the looping and spiraling itself. In later
versions of the docuverse these nodes are conceived of as the “spans” of a
“permascroll.”38 The totalizing and ultimate instantiation of a Nelsonian
docuverse is a representation of the permascroll.
The permascroll is another important point of view from which to
examine the Nelsonian docuverse. It is the linear and literal representation
of every textual event. It is all writing, everything written, everything
inscribed as language, as and when it was so inscribed. Hypertext can then
be generated from the permascroll through operations that display linked
windows onto spans of the scroll. Textual history and textual criticism can
be recast as a vast but particular and privileged set of pointers to those spans
on the permascroll representing various textual events that are—culturally,
institutionally—significant for the archive and interpretation of a writing
FIGURE 7.4 Illustration from Literary Machines 93.1, p. 2/14. Courtesy of Ted
Nelson.
tradition. A book, for example, may be viewed as one (complex) window on

the scroll, its coordinates and output parameters determined by a particular
culture’s definition of “book” as textual framing device containing the end
product of many processes (e.g., editing) that examine and select from prior
collections of spans delineated on the permascroll and representing the
chronological development of the text.
The textual event

To my mind, Nelson’s vision is truly that: visionary, magnificent. It is an
ultimate system, the epitome of a textual universe composed of editions,
composed, that is, from minimal, transcriptable textual events. And yet it
begs a question that throws our underlying concerns into high relief: “What
is a textual event?” Nelson’s concerns—as opposed to those of literary artist-
practitioners—were first and foremost documentary, as Philippe Bootz has
noted.39 Nelson proposed a reconfiguration of the documentary universe that
is more than equal to the task of handling all the nuances of textuality and
its criticism as currently instituted and implemented in traditional literary
media.40 The textual event is defined culturally, by cultural institutions and
by media technologies. In our own context, the institutions that dominate
literature and language art are editorial bodies—universities, publishers,
the world of letters—and for these authorities the textual event is still
ultimately determined by a simple test: “Can it be printed?” In recent years,
this formulation may have been slightly modified (by the web in particular)
to: “Can it be printed out?” Nelson challenges and reconfigures the forms
of display and the engines generating our textual points of view but he
does not fundamentally challenge the notion of textual event.41 Specifically,
he does not address the necessity, I propose, to allow the textual signifier
to include—as inherent constituents of its materiality—temporality and
programmability.
Consider how Rosenberg’s diagram or intergram poems might be
transcribed on the Nelsonian permascroll. As it happens, all the textual
elements of a Rosenberg piece are determinate: they may be conceived as
authorially composed and transcriptable editions. As such all the elements
of a diagram poem or intergram and all of its states could be rendered by the
permascroll and its engines, except that, crucially, there is no obvious—or
institutionally recognized—way to represent (1) overlay and simultaneity or
(2) the dissolution and resolution of these textual properties in necessarily
temporal and ergodic processes.42 Both of these features are intrinsic to
the aesthetic, and to the significance and affect of Rosenberg’s work, to
its meanings. Appended to the scroll and its engines, one could imagine
the record of code—or of abstracted representations of algorithms—that
would allow all of the features of a poem to be rendered and reproduced,

but these would not be part of the scroll or its native systems; they would
not be instituted as a recognized part of the docuverse, even the Nelsonian
docuverse, let alone the traditional world of letters.
In a sense, I am revisiting old arguments concerning the specific technical
capabilities of our emergent media of inscription. Circa 1994 hypertext
arrives in the world of letters, and certain practitioners and theorists
complain of its inadequacies, its inability to implement a wide range of the
intrinsic potential for an extended literacy in networked and programmable
media.43 However, besides pin-pointing “what gets left out” of textuality
by both print and hypertextual culture (our focus is the temporality and
programmability of the signifier, the textual event), the Nelsonian example
highlights the complicity of institutions with the implicit cultural resistance
to certain forms of practice. The resistance is not just a function of
technology. Nelson is radical in demanding a revolution that extends to
literary institutions. He imagines a total migration of literary content to
new media, and goes so far as to propose a total reconfiguration of critical
apparatus and intertextuality, of tools for quotation and reference.44 He also
provides, to my mind, a workable mechanism that upholds basic principles
and moral rights established by copyright, while shifting their control and
management away from the actual-existing copyright hegemonies that
threaten to dominate and constrain cultural production in new media.45
That is radical.
Temporal and literal institutions

The institutions that are not challenged by the Nelsonian paradigm are
those cultural institutions that authorize and maintain a definition of the
fundamental atom of inscription and its relationship to a particular, privileged
type of temporality. The minimal unit of text—of the symbolic, of language-
in-Western-culture—is the letter, an abstraction we conceive as timeless.
Strings of letters that are structured into words, sentences, paragraphs,
chapters, books, and so on, we also think of as having a temporality that is
deferred. We say that writing renders time as space, while also, of course,
always allowing its power to represent (arbitrarily complex) temporal
structures in content.46 For any particular text, we accept any of its recorded
histories or chronologies that can be expressed in terms of these atoms of
inscription. This acceptance allows and accounts for the complexities of
textual criticism, for the relatively sophisticated notion of “text” that these
practices require—for text as a history of editions, however provisional and
reworkable. Hypertext provides a navigable visualization of the relationships
between such fundamental units of inscription, while Nelson’s particular
genius was to provide a generalization of these complex requirements and

a potential reconfiguration of their underlying structures, one that was
radically, institutionally implicated. However, because of the properties
of their shared fundamental atom of inscription—particularly its deferred
temporality—all of these forms of textuality may, if necessary (typically this
will be for institutional reasons or to allow the text’s accessibility to familiar,
traditional, interiorized reading practices), be rendered as print, without
affecting—institutionally—the interpretation and appreciation of the
text’s aesthetic, its strategies of signification, its generation of meanings, its
significance and affect.47 Furthermore, this printing out implicitly privileges
a particular form of temporality: an (arbitrary) sequencing of elements of
inscription that is ineluctable during any particular experience (or “printing
out”) of a text’s instantiation but which, in institutional terms, appears to
be inevitable and necessary, to the extent that we may prefer one sequence
of elements and come to designate this sequence as the text, as its standard,
canonical edition.
This type of canonization will not work for a Rosenberg intergram.
Neither will it work for a wide-ranging and growing corpus of work that
is textual and also, to give only the most obvious examples of textual
properties that are not, as it were, “(perma)scrollable”: animated, generated,
indeterminate, the product or instantiation of real-time collaboration. To
take one example—textual animation—we can see that in cinematic film
titling, in advertising using time-based delivery media, and finally in the
poetics of networked and programmable media, textual animation has a
history and highly developed, if inadequately articulated, rhetoric specific
to its textual materiality. The atoms of this textual matter cannot be simply
recast as arbitrary sequences of letters, not without bracketing, masking or
ignoring vital aspects of these texts’ signifying strategies—specifically, for
example, a whole range of transition effects from text to text. This means,
unambiguously, that criticism must address the cultivation and articulation
of temporality in this work as well as, if not also by way of, an analysis of
the code that guarantees and drives literal temporality.
Code generates literal time

Code as programming has other contributions to make to the emergent
tropes and figures of a rhetoric extended so as to articulate the signifying
strategies of writing in networked and programmable media, reflecting its
materiality and media specificities.48 However, in so far as code generates
the temporalities of writing in programmable media, it highlights what I
believe is currently the most important thread in a program that criticism
and theory must follow in order to accept these temporalities as integral
and inalienable properties of all atoms of signification in literal, indeed,

literary art. Without its code—even when rendered as elaborate “scrollable”
hypertext—Rosenberg’s work sacrifices vital aspects of its aesthetics, its
strategies of signification, its power to generate significance, affect, meaning.49
The effect of an intergram arises largely, as we have said, from simultaneities
and from temporal and ergodic processes that dissolve and resolve these
simultaneities. The cultivation and articulation of real, material time is built
into the text through coding.
Much play, in the recent criticism of new media poetics, has been
made of the visibility of a literary work’s engagement with the material
specificities of its media, what might be called its material self-reflexivity.
In Writing Machines, Katherine Hayles demonstrates brilliantly how
Mark Danielewski makes us see and feel and hear the (empty/nothing/
void in his House of) Leaves.50 However, we still—in this and other print
culture examples—see and feel and hear the “leaves” using technologies of
inscription that are profoundly familiar within the culture and institutions
of literature and pedagogy in general: parallelism of textual streams (text
and footnotes); commentaries, and commentaries on commentaries;
multiple perspectives; typographic novelties; not least, temporal
complexities represented as content while formally virtualized and
deferred by writing. We must also however acknowledge and distinguish
texts in media that are composed with code and that allow authors and
readers to program aspects of temporality as integral parts of the text, as
constitutive of its very materiality, and we must recognize a productive,
critical opposition between writing as deferral/spatialization—of content
including representations of time however complex—and writing as
program and performance—in and of time. We need to elaborate this
distinction for many reasons:
The real temporal dimension of the materiality of text has been
underplayed and overwhelm by the stasis and persistence of authorized
editions.
A materiality of text that embraces temporality offers a more general
theory of textuality, backwardly applicable to work in durable media.
A significant body of work now exists that is made from programmed
signifiers and can be displayed using time-based media, and this body
of work remains literally unreadable and largely resistant to methods of
interpretation that cannot cope with temporality in a sophisticated manner.
Work of this type includes performative pieces that are made of language
and are expressed as literary art but which cannot be addressed using the
existing tools of literary criticism.
Finally, much of this work is explicitly generated by and made, at least
in part, from code, coding that has an unambiguous relationship with the
programmatological engines of new media, the tools we now habitually use
to write.
Code is presented to us as a special type of linguistic archive. It leaves

traces on the surface of literary culture that cannot be denied or ignored,
even in works that do not make art with these traces. Strangely, the code
is hidden as it runs—driving the temporal atoms of literal signification,
restructuring the culture of human time. The code of programmatology
embodies a literal interior now calling to us for articulation and poiesis.51
8
The Gravity of the Leaf:
Phenomenologies of Literary
Inscription in Media-constituted
Diegetic Worlds
Particular arts, especially when regarded as “cultural practices,” are

constituted in terms of the media with which they engage. Quite clearly,
with a nod to Clement Greenberg, in many realms of practice, “painting”
is constituted by “paint.” Hence, I take “literary” in the phrase “literary
arts” to characterize a manifold, culturally instituted system of media within
which arts of language may be represented and embodied. However, the
relationship of language, let alone language art, to its media is inherently
and profoundly problematic. This problematic is frequently engaged by
theoretical discourses of many kinds, and hinges, I believe, on the necessarily
problematic interplay between ideality and contingent representation
that is a sine qua non of symbolic practice.1 In this chapter, I approach
this problematic primarily in terms of such practice but in a manner that
has significant implications for theory, specifically for any theory that
relates language and media or, in particular, speaks of language as media.
I argue that aspects of the problematic become literally visible to us when
we are able to see that language always comes to us from a world that
is distinct from the media-constituted diegetic world within which it is
represented. Whenever we practice language, to give and receive its objects
of poiesis, we must always also enact what I theorize as a diegetic break.
This phenomenon does not always obtain in the practice and reception of
arts associated with other media, with architecture providing, arguably, the
example of an artistic practice that has a human currency commensurate
with that of language and yet instantiates the starkest contrast, relative to
language, in terms of how we may live with and within a particular aesthetic
practice. We live in architecture without departing from a world in which
we live. We live in (aesthetic) language only in so far as we leave the world
in which the language is embodied.2 If this is the case, then it has always
been the case, and I believe that poetry and poetic practice has been one
of the sites of greatest awareness of the phenomena associated with these
relations—perhaps, paradoxically, precisely because of its long-standing
attention to form and presentation—both traditional form such as rhythmic
structure, and rhyme and experimental, innovative, indeed, disjunctive
form—as a function of materiality—which term I take to refer to media in
the broadest possible sense. However, as poetry moves “beyond text” we are
re-confronted with the problem of giving a home to the other-worldly in the
new media-constituted diegetic worlds within which, all-too-suddenly, we
find ourselves living, albeit, to some extent, artificially.3 Because language
has been constrained to the mind, the voice, and latterly to the “surface
of the leaf,” we have internalized its being-in-all-possible-worlds as such.
When it appears in “new media” we are re-sensitized to the experience of its
never-having-belonged-here.
The world within which I am writing

In this chapter, I put forward formulations of certain relations between
language and media, and these I consider to have general applicability,
regardless of the actual media with which we are concerned. Nonetheless,
I am making use of media-specific practice and experience, and I refer to
prior critical engagements with the issues and problems addressed and
these are also media-specific. In both cases the media which concern us
are visual. The thoughts and arguments which follow are prompted by my
work in Brown University’s Cave, where my students and I continue to
address the problem of creating work that pretends to a literary aesthetic in
audiovisually immersive programmable media. Although the Brown Cave is,
as stated, an audiovisual device—the systems we use are equipped with 5.1
surround sound—I do not, in this chapter, speak directly to the relationship
between literal art and media that are constituted by sound. The discussion
is constrained to Cave work as immersive 3D graphics, as visual media.
There is a useful conceptual and lexical rhyme between the technical
vocabulary of 3D graphics and the theory of media-constituted diegetic
worlds that I formulate. In 3D graphics, the gestalt of a graphics system’s
various projected images is, together, referred to as a “world.” In the case
of Brown’s Cave, a four-walled device, this “world” is constituted by two
times four projections: one for each eye (left and right) times four for each
wall (left, front, right, and floor in the case of Brown’s Cave). Shuttering
THE GRAVITY OF THE LEAF 117
glasses are worn by the Cave user and these glasses synchronize with the
otherwise imperceptibly alternating left-eye, right-eye images, filtering the
corresponding projections into the corresponding eye in order to achieve
a simulation of stereo vision. The (two times) four wall-projected images
are generated, and, as necessary, corrected—in terms of perspective and the
deformations required to compensate for the flat projection surfaces of a
cube-shaped room—in order to provide a coherent graphic “world” for one
particular pair of glasses-wearing human eyes, whose position in the artificial
space is tracked such that the system can respond to its movement through
the “world” in “real time” (or rather in the “time” of the graphic world).
This brief description of the Cave introduces the specific visual world within
which we write, and into which we are asked to bring literal art, literary
aesthetics (Figure 8.1). We are, in this artificial visual space, writing digital
media, and our focus will be on the way that language appears in this visual
world and how it functions.
When we write for the Cave, we write—bracketing any audio component
within the scope of the present arguments—for a world of images. As we
FIGURE 8.1 Photographs taken during a showing of Glitch, 2008, by Jason Lee,
Ben Nicholson, and Jinaabah Showa: writing for the Cave immersive 3D audiovisual
environment, Brown University, Center for Computation and Visualization.
Photographs courtesy of Francisco J. Ricardo.
have seen above, this suggestive impression is borne out by a technological

analysis underlying the constitution of the device—of its particular system
of media—and rhyming on the word “world.”4 The predominant material
support for writing, conventionally understood, is, of course, graphics.
This is just one of many reasons for a host of perennial inquiries—both
theoretical and pragmatic—into the relationship between word and image,
language and visuality. In a sense, this chapter takes yet another tilt at this
intractable problem. Apart from our arguments’ engagement with actual
poiesis in the graphics world of the Cave itself, we will work with a number
of theoretical statements on word and image, in particular W. J. T. Mitchell
on metapictures and Michel Foucault’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe.5 However,
the statements of this chapter have a different trajectory, not in the direction
of a “pictorial turn,” to evoke Mitchell’s phrase, but an address to writing in
visual digital media that is focused on language, its aesthetic potential, and
on questions of how language dwells with us in “new,” or in a designation
that I prefer, “breaking” media. I claim that the relations between language
and media that are revealed in our work and the discussions here are
backwardly compatible with those in conventional literary media and require
us both to reformulate relations that have become subliminal or culturally
internalized, and to reconsider or reframe precisely the kind of discussion of
articulated, linguistically implicated visuality that is undertaken by Foucault
and Mitchell.
Working in the Cave finds us within a relatively rarefied and extreme, test-
case environment. Although the technology has been available to scientists
for some time, it is rarely accessible to aesthetic practitioners, still more
rarely accessible to those who self-identify as literary artists. In the midst of
a culture where we are ever-increasingly obliged to confront and explore the
relationship between art in digital and new media and art as conventionally
understood, attempting to make literary art in the Cave sets many issues
and problems of mediated aesthetic practice, including but not only those
discussed here, into high relief—as I aim to demonstrate. The spirit of the
age seems to demand that we attempt to bring all art into those new forms
of practice that programmable systems of intermedial representation offer
us, to explore, indeed, the language of new media.6 Confusions arise when
so-called “new” media are configured to represent “old” media, a cultural
trope now widely recognized as remediation.7 Happily, writing or even just
“placing” linguist “material” in an immersive 3D artificial world is something
that is less ambiguously novel. Phenomenologically, language, as graphic
inscription, does not appear or dwell in our world of lived experience in
the mode of objects having position, volume, structure, and so on, except in
a manner that is highly constrained and fundamentally two-dimensional.8
My title, “the gravity of the leaf,” evokes an underlying cultural force that
draws graphic linguistic materiality to the two-dimensional surface and
holds it there still. This force is phenomenological and accumulative, a
function of the exigencies of graphically embodied symbolic practice that is

addressed to humans. This force is strong and its strength is, I believe, borne
out by the various ways in which we continue to read our now ubiquitous
screens as page- or leaf-like surfaces rather than, for example, as spatial
affordances, as symbolic architecture, shifting the shapes within which we
live. Obviously, culture is changing, and this very aspect of writing to which
I refer, somewhat polemically, is at the breaking edge of a wave. Finally
exposed, “the gravity of the leaf” may nonetheless break down and may do
so for some of the reasons that I set out below, because our understanding of
the relationship of language and media must be reformulated, recast. Even
the gravity of the leaf is relative to certain paradigms, especially the literary
paradigms, of culture and history. In the first place, it can only have gathered
its strength in a world where the graphical inscription of symbolic practice
had been discovered and developed, and thence prevailed, proliferated,
and become internalized as the familiar (leafy) world of print culture, now,
perhaps already evolved to printable culture in the developed world.9 In
the Cave the gravity of the leaf breaks down before our eyes and language
is cut loose. It may still be rendered as, itself, lacking a third dimension
but in so far as it is visible at all in the Cave’s graphics world it will be
positioned in space, a strange object, perhaps floating in front of a pair of
position-tracked, glasses-wearing eyes, legible as usual but situated, in terms
of culture and aesthetics, where and in what world?
Imagine a letter floating before our eyes in the immersive visual space
of the Cave, the representation of an atom of language, but presented to
us in a new world, in a world of what I will call “breaking media.” This is
a novel experience, a new phenomenology of language, and thus it would
allow the proper application of the word “new” as in “new media.” The
letter floating in space is not remediation; it is a novel mediation of language
because it represents graphically embodied language in a way that is entirely
unfamiliar, cut loose, as I put it, from the gravity of the leaf. Nonetheless I
prefer to put forward “breaking media” as a term for the manifold systems
of representation that such programmable devices offer both because is it
less likely to be inaccurate (so-called new media often represents/remediates
old media) and because the epithet is suggestive. Programmable and
networked media break into public discourse, as does breaking news, and
often in the same contemporary mode, occasionally itself breaking the news
of its own advent. Digital media accelerate cultural changes and roll them
into an ever-growing, breaking wave where we surf just beneath its spumy
crest on an edge that is breaking but not necessarily leading or bleeding.
Moreover, breaking media do often just break, in the programmer’s sense.
They break themselves and they break legacy processes. It is both the case
that familiar things that used to function no longer function in breaking
media and that breaking media often breaks down in fits of innovation. But
finally, these various breaks also contribute to what we discuss below and
what are proposed as media-constituted diegetic breaks, breaks in the world

or worlds that, for one thing, allow language into the world itself and into
the worlds that we make.
The representation of writing

Questions concerning materiality and embodiment have been very much
to the fore in contemporary analyses and theories of artistic and critical
practice. In so far as the trope of immateriality is associated with the realm
of computation—along with the cultural production which computation
has appropriated through remediation or has, itself, generated—there is a
proportional effort to restate and critically reinstate its necessary materiality,
an effort that is presumed to have aesthetic traction in critical discourse
and is sometimes implicitly or explicitly heralded as part of a return of the
repressed.10 By accepting that the digitization of a painting is not the painting
we grow sensitive to these two speculative objects’ distinct materialities, but
we are left with the problem of accounting for their close notional or indeed
visual relationships, the latter of which might be instantiated such that
any and all differences between the objects are materially imperceptible to
human and therefore human cultural vision. But the situation of (mediated)
figurative painting does not directly address the sharper and arguably more
fundamental problem of any materiality of language itself. What is the
culturally perceptible ontological difference between this text digitized and
this text printed? I want us to remain conscious that the question of the
“materiality of language” and especially that of literary language underlies
the discussion. However, I will wager that it proves more fruitful, in terms
of both theory and practice, to examine the relationship between language
and its instantiation in or as media.
We may consider painting as media.11 Painting—focusing on non-
conceptual painting—is, for the purposes of my argument, a media system
addressed to the visible world and constituted by practices engaged primarily
with the way the world is seen and made to be seen, both with those aspects of
the materiality of things that makes them visible and with the material from
which images of things can be made, including, among other things, paint.
Especially given our critical texts of reference—Foucault, Mitchell concerned
with a painting in this mode—we do well to establish a correspondence
between painting as media and the more current understanding of media
per se, in particular the new digital media within which we write. Painting
is a media-constituted world within which discourses of various kinds may
be played out and made visible for human interpretation and aesthetic
engagement. These discourses are predominantly and naturally visual—the
discourses of an image world—since they are realized in visual material
(typically and for the type of painting that concerns us here in solely visual
material), but they may also be or become linguistic or symbolic in one of at
least two ways: by way of special cases—as in much of Magritte’s work—
where language is inscribed or represented, but also, arguably, in terms of
the very “pictorial turn” posited by Mitchell, by means of which practices
of visuality are so prevalent and articulated in the culture that they literalize
this articulation and “speak” with the clarity and force of conventional
linguistic discourse.12
It is more difficult to consider writing as media in an analogous sense. To
unravel certain aspects of this difficulty is precisely our aim, and so to make
any direct attempt now would risk tightening the knot we are attempting to
loosen and describe. Suffice it to say that the material supports for writing
are severely constrained in the worlds of human material culture—graphic
inscription, oral practices, articulate thought. Whereas, for example, the
diverse materialities of the media available to visual representation are
commensurate with those of the visual world—infinite means to represent
infinite images—the infinite subjects of linguistic representation obviously
and infinitely exceed the materialities of the constrained media which bear
this world-making language.
New digital media are not just to be considered as media; they are
media. The existence of media that are able to represent other media or to
represent artifacts that were made in a traditional medium as (new) media
(remediation) is, in a sense, the phenomenon that allows us to see older
conventional media as such; to see that painting, for example, is media,
not just a medium. Subsequently, we struggle to distinguish, materially and
critically, between conventional media(tion) and any corresponding new
(re)media(tion): the painting and its digitization, as a specific exemplary
instance. In the case of literary art, as indicated above, such struggles are,
typically, futile. It is pointless to insist on a materially significant difference
between these words as they might appear to you on paper and as they
might appear to you on screen.13 Thus, whenever we do consider differences
in writing and mediated writing to be critically or materially significant,
we tend to speak of writing in new digital media, as if writing were not
undergoing remediation, but as if it were being newly mediated by removal
from an unmediated condition and translation into media.
I am going to write about René Magritte’s famous painting, La trahison
des images, 1929 (The Treachery of Images, or simply (The) Treachery) in
what follows. Some of my remarks may not seem to display a comprehensive
sense of the art historical and art philosophical context in which this much-
discussed work has been situated. In part this is a matter of my professional
experience and inclination, but it is chiefly the result of my treating this
painting as a specific instance of media device within the overall media-
constituted world of painting. Certain properties and methods of this
device manifest remarkable correspondences with those of the Cave, to an
instance, that is, of new, breaking media within which we also write and
produce images. To extend the analogy from object-oriented programming,
Magritte’s painting and the Cave may both be seen to be derived from an
abstract “class” of media devices.
The Treachery is an oil painting, unambiguously a work of visual art,
although one that directly addresses the relationship between image and
word. As a media device, it is indeed unambiguous; it belongs in the world
of the visual. Apart from its evident materiality as an oil painting on canvas,
the work will be viewed in an art museum, itself an architecturally (spatially/
visually) constituted world where painting and other fine art are typically
displayed. Setting to one side for the moment the products of such groups
as Art & Language or conceptual work (and all the discussion here), we
don’t go to a gallery to read (a book) or smoke (a pipe). As you look around
the museum—the painting is now in the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art—you will see it hung within a visually coherent world where it will not
be out of place. Granted, it is a metapicture and it does, as we will reaffirm,
disrupt diegesis, but not in its material form as an aspect of the media
system of painting set within the visual/architectural media of the museum’s
gallery space. You don’t look around the gallery and say to yourself,
“That is not a painting. That is language, commentary, metastatement,
graffiti, an acousmatic stain.” Moreover, in terms of the first instance of
critical response, the artist’s own, we have the painting’s title, La trahison
des images (the treachery of images), not, notably, “la trahison des mots,”
not “the treachery of language.” The title sums up an inclination of critical
response to the painting as it is exemplified both by Foucault’s essay and
by Mitchell’s commentary. For both these commentators—despite the fact
that their primary interest is the pursuit of language, discourse, the way that
statements are made—this strange, simple, and strangely simple assemblage
of graphic elements, including language, is still, obviously, a picture.14
Nonetheless, Magritte’s Treachery does include, depict, address, and
concern language. More than this, the painting is also, at least in part,
writing. Perhaps, in fact, the work is writing? Initially, it is very easy and
natural for us to say that, for example, the line of text—“Ceci n’est pas
une pipe”—at the bottom of the painting is writing in visual media, writing
within the media of painting. Why isn’t it writing itself? Why couldn’t
we claim, for example, that the painting is dominated by this address to
language and by its own actual instance of writing and that therefore, as a
whole, it is writing, predominantly or in terms of a “deeper” interpretative
or semiological reading, it is writing as media, and that, in fact, the image
content of the picture is in written media, it is, in fact, imagery within the
media of writing?
Of course, Magritte willfully, pointedly, if perhaps unconsciously, sets
up this flip-flop, apparently symmetrical structure of complementary
interpretations. In fact, he’s already answered the question and so have
we. He painted the picture and we either see it in an art museum or see
it reproduced as a painting that exists as such in the museum. Magritte’s
paintings are, very definitely, in a particular register, one that is not the
usual register of painting, not even the usual register of surrealist painting
if you think, for example, of Max Ernst or even of the de Chirico that
Magritte revered. Neither Ernst nor de Chirico can be as immediately
“read,” catastrophically, in linguistic terms, the way we read Magritte.
I believe, for instance, that Magritte’s painting can be seen as the visual
complement of concrete poetry, where my definition of concrete poetry is
not simply an aesthetic linguistic work the specifics of whose visual (or
non-linguistic) manifestation are significant and affective (that would be
true of all writing in so far as it is represented graphically), but a linguistic
work that engages materially with the rhetoric and aesthetics of the visual
world and/or the world of (concrete) objects. Concrete poetry is language
rendered in such a way as to appear as visual images or to behave like
objects and, in a complementary manner, Magritte’s paintings are images
and objects rendered in such a way as to perform language acts or to appear
to be language. Both practices, arguably, are culturally marginal, minority
practices; exemplary perhaps, but neither typical nor central. The point I
want to make here is that the apparent symmetry of the implied relationship
between language and media is an illusion. Both Magritte’s writing in
the media of painting and the kind of writing in new digital media that
underlies our own inquiry, ultimately, help us see this, and do this in part,
I believe, by the very fact of spanning all the intervening critical, linguistic,
and artistic exploration and practice which has continually addressed the
same or related problematics.
In a sense, I am recasting and reworking the kind of semiological analyses
of image and text that was undertaken by Roland Barthes and implicit in
both Foucault and Mitchell.15 Here I will, through Barthes, anchor my use of
the elaborate term “media-constituted diegetic world” before applying such
thinking first to Magritte’s Treachery and then to writing in immersive 3D
graphics, to writing in new digital media. In the two essays that most concern
me and which open Stephen Heath’s translated selection Image Music Text,
Barthes is mainly concerned with photography, “a continuous message,” as
he says, or “a message without a code.”16 Barthes understands as well as
anyone that “the image—grasped immediately by an inner metalanguage,
language itself—in actual fact has no denoted state, is immersed for its
very social existence in at least an initial layer of connotation, that of the
categories of language.”17 Nonetheless, for him, photography has a special
relation to the world which he describes as being “continuous,” syntagmatic
with the world of (natural, phenomenological, human) experience.18
Photographs are both (actually and virtually) in our world, and appear to
be (in a special, privileged sense) contiguous with its constitutive objects.
For Barthes (one thinks also of Benjamin), “the photograph is not the last
(improved) term of the great family of images; it corresponds to a decisive

mutation of informational economies.”19
But this isn’t exactly so. Barthes writes before the existence of sophisticated
media history/archaeology, and before the prevalence of media constructed
from abstract symbolic manipulation—programmable and networked
media. He understands certain aspects of a special relationship between the
media-constituted diegesis of photography and the diegesis of the world per
se (although strictly, in my terms, the latter is always already composed from
a manifold of media-constituted diegetic worlds), but Barthes considers that
it is naturalized by syntagmatic “flow”—enabling a continuous diegesis—
between photography and the world.20 What Barthes proposes could not
be the case even if photography were, in any sense, “perfect” or “natural.”
Whatever photography is, it is always constituted by its media and not by
a privileged relationship with the world, a relationship that is, in any case,
necessarily interpretable, as Barthes demonstrates with great critical and
ideological traction. However, in material terms and apart from any logic
of argument, we can easily see that the representational world of what we
ironically call “photographic naturalism” is, among other things, determined
by characteristics of the type of focus that can be reproduced by the optics
of lenses—depth of field—and that these clearly distinguish photographs, in
terms of human optical experience, from the objects in the world that they
are held to represent. Photography does not see the world as we do; we just
agree that it does (for a relatively long historical period, admittedly crucial).
As media change, however, we become ever less sure of photography’s
“special (uncoded) relationship” with our visual world.
My sense of “media” in the phrase through which I am rethinking the
practice of writing in or with new digital media is an entirely contingent,
if persistent, historical, and material embodiment of what Barthes, also
within his analysis of photography, says “is commonly called the style of
the reproduction.”21 Barthes brings style into the discussion while asking,
“Are there other messages [that is: apart from photography in Barthes’s
view] without code?” He answers: no, because even all analogical visual
reproductions have style, “whose signifier is a certain ‘treatment’ of the image
(result of the action of the creator) and whose signified, whether aesthetic or
ideological, refers to a certain ‘culture’ of the society receiving the message.”22
Analogical reproductions are coded with these connotations; they are not
simply or even initially denotive objects in the world. He goes on to say, “for
all these imitative arts—when common—the code of the connoted system
is very likely constituted either by a universal symbolic order or by a period
rhetoric, in short by a stock of stereotypes (schemes, colors, graphisms,
gestures, expressions, arrangements of elements).”23 In my view, all that is
missing from Barthes’s “style” in order to render it as my conception of
media is the admission of a necessary intimacy between technology, device,
prosthesis, and coded, connotative practices in the cultures of both “the
creator” and “the society receiving the message.” Barthes would acquire
a way of handling photography as a function of media specificity, his
exceptional and highly valuable insights accessible—largely unchanged
in their tenor—because there is a new device in the world, the properties
and methods of which have new syntagmatic relationships with the world,
allowing a media-constituted diegesis to arise. Barthes reminds me that all
media are intimate with rhetoric, style being a word from its discourse that
encapsulates shared connotations of cultural practices undertaken by both
actual makers and others within those institutions to which they address
their poiesis.
Diegesis here is used in a manner that is related to the way it is used in
narrative and film theory, but the usage is extended to refer to worlds of
cultural practices, “diegetic worlds” within which syntagmatic “flows” can
occur.24 I say that these diegetic worlds are “media-constituted,” which, as
outlined above, implies that they are a combination of technology, device,
prosthesis on the one hand and what I’m content to call “style” on the
other. As a serviceable sketch of what I mean by style, I am also content
with Barthes’s far from exhaustive but suggestive listing: “schemes, colors,
graphisms, gestures, expressions, arrangements of elements.”25 When
technology and style work together as media, they create a diegetic world.
Note that media-constituted diegetic worlds may be in any number
of relationships, bordering one another, intersected, overlaid, and so on.
Because, as media, they are themselves constituted by both technology
and style; either of these medial aspects may provide points or areas of
contiguity between such diegetic worlds. Photography can be considered
as media constituting a diegetic world. Barthes, recast in these terms,
believed (at least for the purpose of critical thinking) that the world of
photography was continuous—syntagmatically connected—with nature as
envisioned by humans. This was, and is a, function of both technology and
style: photography’s recording technology—capturing a moment of two-
dimensionally spatialized light—and a style of optical representation that is
still, currently, accepted as “naturalism,” even though this manner of vision
is quite distinct from how we see. Whether or not we reject any notion of
an essential—permanent, non-contingent—contiguity between the media-
constituted diegesis of photography and the diegesis of human culture/
nature (which I take to be a manifold of all existing media-constituted
diegetic worlds), nonetheless, the properties and methods of photography
relate to the world in a media-specific manner that support most, if not all,
of the interpretative insights that Barthes draws from his analysis.
What happens when a photographic image is altered, as in many of
John Baldessari’s works?26 I am thinking in particular of later series and
pieces, from the 1980s onward where, often, the faces of human and
occasionally animal figures are obscured by bright, flat monochromatic
circular shapes.27 Viewing and reading such composite images we
experience a clash of (at least) two media-constituted diegetic worlds,

those of photography and an immediately recognizable, if difficult to
designate, style of representation based on these flat monochromic regions
of color, generated by geometry, silhouette, or gesture (when such regions
are over-drawn or over-painted by hand). There is a perceptible, indeed, a
sharp diegetic break between the two worlds. We perceive this as chiefly
a matter of representational style but, on reflection, it is clear that this
distinction of style is also supported by distinctions of technology and of
cultural practices attributable to both medial aspects of the two worlds.
Relationships of potential contiguity between the worlds will not be
determined by the break, however. These are likely to be manifold. For a
start, there are intersections of technologies between the two media, mark-
making on paper for one. Thus, Baldessari’s overlays on photographic
reproductions are able, palpably, to bring the worlds into material
contiguity. Syntagmatic flows both proceed via the paper and are visually
arrested by the persistent break of style. Moreover, Baldessari’s layered
hybrid art practices and the diegesis of photography share, in the realm
of style, an attention to the composition of visual elements. The colored
circular regions are carefully positioned over faces, not at random. In
other works by Baldessari, these monochromatic regions may substitute
as representations of whatever directly underlies them in the world of the
photograph,28 or monochrome silhouettes may be carefully integrated,
spatially, in the photographic diegesis.29 These niceties represent further
syntagmatic flows, of compositional style this time, nonetheless still
arrested by the break, by the necessary tear that will inevitably show forth
between distinct media-constituted diegetic worlds.
A cultural artifact, a work of art, will, simply, by dint of its existence
and integrity as an object, present us with a coherent world, and it will
also, of course, be a part of ours, a syntagm in the diegesis of our culture,
potential or actual. But typically, it will itself, although less obviously than
in the case of this work by Baldessari, subsist as a manifold of media-
constituted diegetic worlds. When we refer to multimedia art—admittedly
with quite distinct critical intentions—we implicitly highlight actual and
often troubling diegetic breaks between the media-constituted worlds from
which such art is made.
Now we return to Magritte’s Treachery on the way to the Cave. As I have
set out above, this work exists, first and foremost, in the media-constituted
diegetic world of painting, more specifically oil painting, more specifically
the style of mimetic figuration. Magritte’s painting may hang happily in a
gallery alongside other paintings that show us the world as—in oil-painted
mimesis—it appears to be.30 I am not going to enter the metapictorial abyss
of The Treachery and related works in Magritte’s oeuvre. This subject is
more than adequately dealt with by Mitchell. I want, for the moment, to
concentrate on the picture’s painted “background.”
Manifestly, materially, this background is part of the painting’s media-

constituted diegetic world and yet it is so nondescript as to appear to be
what it is: inconsequential. We take no account of the background. It has
no consequence, which I also take to mean that it leads to no sequence, that
it is not a syntagm of any diegesis in any world.31 The background is a no
thing, no place, no where, not in any world except that of the painting. It
is the painted depiction of an indeterminate surface. The “pipe” is not fixed
to this surface in any way, neither could its nondescript light beige color be
read as an “atmosphere” in which the pipe is floating.32 Is the inscription
painted or written on this surface? Common sense would answer, yes, but I
believe that this is also and crucially indeterminate. I prefer the view that it
is not. This inscription is a painting of writing and it is floating in front of
the indeterminate surface and bears the same graphic, visual relation to this
surface—in the diegetic world of The Treachery—as does the painting of the
pipe in its more obvious oil-painted mimesis. However, relations between
these objects and the surface differ, and they are neither complementary nor
symmetrical. From these differences of relation further points concerning
the relationship of language and media emerge.
In certain other discussions of The Treachery, its background is either
ignored or referred to the structure of the caption, more precisely to the
space between caption and image.33 According to Foucault,
On the page of an illustrated book, we seldom pay attention to the

small space running above the words and below the drawing, forever
serving them as a common frontier. It is there, on these few millimeters of
white, the calm sand of the page, that are established all the relations of
designation, nomination, description, classification.34
The existing English translation of Foucault by Harkness would have us see

The Treachery as “the unraveled calligram,” at best some kind of “(former)
calligram undone” (“défait”), even though it was never a calligram in the first
place. Foucault can be understood as thinking more clearly if we translate
his view of The Treachery as the calligram’s undoing, its nemesis. After
all he calls the calligram a trap (“piège”) that “absorbed” the (necessary)
“interstice” between word (caption) and image. Magritte (who never fell
into the trap), produced a painting in which the trap has been shattered
(“a été fracturé”) “on emptiness: image and text falling each to their own
side, subject to their proper gravities. They have no space in common, no
place where they might interact, where words might take figurative shape,
or images enter the lexical order.”35 Which I also read to mean that only in
or because of such a “no place” is it possible, as occurs in The Treachery,
for images to appear to enter the lexical order, only to be (lexically, in
terms of a direct linguistic address, “Ceci n’est pas … ”) immediately,
simultaneously denied by words that that have taken figurative shape in
the media-constituted world of (the) painting. As Foucault points out, these

two highlighted worlds of “lexical order” and “figurative shape” have their
own proper “gravities” (“la gravitation qui leur est propre”) and this brings
us back to the gravity of the leaf, the gravity that is proper to language and
which appears to draw even these figuratively shaped words to a surface
that we know—because of its optical relationship to the image of the pipe—
is no surface, no place.
For the commentators I’ve reviewed and even, to a significant extent, for
Foucault this is “just” the no space between image and caption. My point
is that this no space is, as Foucault also recognizes, the “calm sand of the
page” (“le sable calme de la page”). It’s not thin or small at all. It’s the desert
where we write. It is the very no place that everywhere—everywhere there is
inscription of any kind—draws all language to its surface:
The slender, colorless, neutral strip, which in Magritte’s design separates

the text and the figure, must be seen as a rift, an indeterminate and hazy
region now separating the pipe afloat in its heaven of images from the
earthly footfall of words proceeding along their single file. But it is going
too far to say that this region is a blank or a lacuna: it is more of an
absence of space, the effacement of any “common place” shared by the
signifying marks of writing and the delineation of images.36
There is indeed a relatively thin strip between words and image in The
Treachery and also between the typical layout of image and caption.
However, in the painting, it is, visibly, not really a “strip” at all—it is a part
of the background that is no place, and, for all we know, infinite. Actually,
circumstances are the same for any image and caption. The so-called white
“strip” is simply one of the many places the infinite (no) surface of “leaf”
shows through—the (third) dimension-less leaf, the no thing, no place, no
where, with its strong gravity proper to language. It is also, as it happens,
the no space of the Cave.
What happens if we translate the objects in the painting to the Cave?
Arguably this is not a remediation. The pipe and its “caption” are already in
the very no space that the Cave simply actualizes as an immersive illusion.
But follow me in this thought experiment.37 We are standing within the
Cave, its four projective surfaces in front, to the left and right, and beneath
our point of view. The no-color of The Treachery’s background has been
projected on to these surfaces and we ignore or no longer see those places
where the walls meet. The walls have disappeared for us and we are in,
or rather, immersively before the surface of Magritte’s painting. The pipe
and the inscription fade into view before our eyes, seemingly at the same
distance from us as they would appear to be if we were comfortably viewing
the painting in a gallery, although we see no frame. (The “frame” is beyond
our field of vision, around the edges of the device, which we are inside.)
Both objects—the pipe, the inscription—look more or less exactly as they

would in the painting. The pipe hangs in space. We sense intuitively that
this can happen as a function of this media-constituted world. There’s no
gravity for image-objects here. However, the inscription is still “placed” in
a more radically ambiguous manner. It must be on a surface, mustn’t it? Is
it inscribed on the background that surrounds us? If so, how could that be?
How could a surface surround us? Can the “leaf” have that property?
Well manifestly, as it turns out, the inscription is not on the leaf or any
surface, at least in that sense. We see this because the objects are moving,
both of them together, and in the same manner. They are slowly rotating
around a vertical, Y, axis that appears to run through the visual center of
both pipe and inscription, between the p and the a of the word pas let’s say.
The pipe rotates and we continue to see a pipe, a pipe suspended in space
and rotating slowly. But the inscription? Apparently, it has no thickness. We
can still see what it is and, for the moment, we can still read it, but the effects
of perspective—foreshortening and the subsequent distortion of the letter
shapes—are making the letters and words look more and more unfamiliar
and harder and harder to read until, suddenly, they’re unreadable, merely a
highly distorted representation of writing.38 Once the objects have rotated
90 degrees in relation to our point of view, they stop and, at this point, the
inscription is “edge on.” It’s still “there,” but it’s not only unreadable, it’s
invisible.39
This is, of course, far from the end of the discussion. It is nonetheless,
however, a striking, graphic demonstration of the different manner in which
language as inscription (and, since Derrida, it is always already inscription)
relates to its medial support. The no place no where of the “background” is
an abstracted instantiation of what is, in other contexts and in all poiesis,
manifested as the manifold site of diegetic breaks between media-constituted
worlds. The acknowledgment of these breaks is precisely what allows us to
treat an arbitrary object from an arbitrary media-constituted world—the
“pipe” in this case—as an instantiated object within what Foucault calls
the “lexical order”—for interpretative purposes, for the sake of making
statements. But so long as the site of the break can be seen and read in any
media-constituted diegetic world, its objects can also be read and treated,
at least provisionally, as “lexical items” without their having to leave their
particular diegetic world or disrupt its coherence. The image of the pipe
rotates in space before the background and remains an image of the pipe—
which we can and do nonetheless deny as a “pipe.” By contrast, the gravity of
the leaf draws inscription to its no place no where no surface with far greater
and necessary force. The inscription is always already within the media-
constituted world of the “lexical order,” which placement is partly determined
by the strange surface of the leaf. As the inscription rotates against this surface
it breaks out of its world and becomes at first unreadable and then invisible,
which it might as well have been when it was merely unreadable. If it keeps
rotating to 180 degrees from its initial position, in a brief continuation of

our thought experiment, it becomes a mirror image, mirror writing, in terms
of human optics, readable but now only by way of an internal process of
decoding, of symbolic manipulation; not, be it noted, of graphic or optical
transformation. The no surface of this leaf is not only geometrically strange,
it must also be programmable, at least in the sense that—as in this case—it
invites a human would-be reader to undertake an intrinsically algorithmic
symbolic manipulation of a mirror-image inscription.
The thought experiment makes my points, bringing Magritte’s Treachery
together with the Cave by treating them both as media devices, where
Magritte’s painting can also be seen as a representation in two dimensions
of an artificial 3D graphics world. I will conclude by going over some of the
statements made in more general terms.
As in the world of The Treachery, the worlds of the Cave are not
syntagmatic with the world in which we live, except by way of artifice—
hence the epithet “artificial” in artificial immersive environment. The
painting works exactly like the Cave except that materially, physically, the
images of the Cave surround us and are doubled and offset to provide us
with a simulation of human stereo optical experience. Relationships between
represented objects and surfaces are remarkably similar, relationships, that is,
between objects and inscriptions that are rendered in the 3D graphics world
of the Cave, and surfaces, both depicted (the beige surface of The Treachery
and the background “texture/color”—often textureless black—of the Cave)
and actual (the projection surfaces of the Cave-as-device and the canvas of
Magritte’s painting). Objects in the Cave are able to hang suspended in the
transparency of its graphic world, like the “pipe” in the painting, without
support or connection to a surface or background-as-surface. They need
not appear to be syntagms of the diegetic world that supports them. In the
Cave, graphic marks of inscription are revealed, typically, as able to exist in
exactly this same mode of suspension, unsupported by contiguity with any
surface against which they are nonetheless visible. In the Cave, moreover—
and this is not, of course, possible in relation to Magritte’s painting—we
may be able to place our point of view between (apparent) surface and
object, to “get behind” it and to verify that it is unsupported.40
My aim has been to establish and begin to delineate differences in the
way that language is implicated with media (and, by extension, embodiment
and materiality) as compared with other aesthetic or potentially aesthetic
practices of poiesis. What, again, are these differences? How does the picture
of the pipe (which is not a pipe) differ from the inscription, “Ceci n’est pas
une pipe.” These differences can, I believe, be expressed in a number of
ways, including in terms of my title, the gravity of the leaf, where “the leaf”
stands, in general, for all (non-)surfaces of inscription, including especially
the countless materially familiar but notionally third-dimensionless leaves
of “paper” on which we write or have written, and also, as in The Treachery,
those backgrounds of graphic worlds that are surfaces but are equally
third-dimensionless no things, no where, in and of no place or space. The
no surface in Magritte’s painting draws the image and the (image of) the
inscription toward itself with qualitatively differing strengths of cultural
gravity and we can see this in the graphic representation. We see that the
pipe hangs suspended in relation to the no surface, held by its gravity but
not touching or fixed to it in terms of its media-constituted diegetic world,
that of figurative painting. The position of the inscription, on the other
hand, is radically ambiguous and contradictory: either its position is the
same as that of the image or else it is not only held by the gravity of the no
surface—the no thing no place no where—it is on that surface, co-defining it
as such while deriving from it all of its own existence as inscription, precisely
as linguistic-marks-on-a-surface, and thus become inseparable from it, in
the very condition of linguistic inscription. For writing, the gravity of the
leaf is the Strong Force itself. Either point of view leads to paradox. If the
inscription hangs suspended, then it belongs to no coherent diegetic world
of which we know, one where a pipe may also appear to be suspended in
space. Handwriting cannot be suspended in space without a surface for it
to be on. If, rather, the inscription is considered to be on the background
surface, then it has gravitated to the no thing, no where, in and of no space,
and so it is diegetically broken away from the media-constituted world of
the pipe’s image.
Of course, these contradictions arise because Magritte has, as I suggested
before, made an untypical painting, one that behaves like language—a visual
complement of concrete poetry. The “pipe” is able to appear like a word in
the lexical order, and so it is also not a pipe in the same way that the word
“pipe” is not a pipe. It does this very clearly and directly by, unusually,
establishing the same sort of—radically ambiguous and contradictory—
relation to the surface, to the gravity of the leaf, that is typical for words,
for inscription. It does this by playing with the media-constituted world of
painting, by depicting a paradox in that world, by graphically illustrating
a diegetic break, the break that we see between the pipe and the surface
against which it is suspended in no world that could ever exist. It cannot be
a pipe. The difference is that the pipe looks like a pipe and the painting does
have a coherence that is established within the media-constituted diegetic
world of figurative painting. The pipe can be in that painted world and,
without any change in point of view, it can appear to be in our own visual
world, the one where paintings exist in galleries and where other pipes can
be held in our hands and before our eyes and compared with the painted
image. The inscription can’t. It’s either stuck on the surface of the painting’s
background, or it’s in a no place where it couldn’t otherwise exist. Even
when made manifest in the artificial world of the Cave, it can only display
a broken relationship to any world. It does have relationships with media-
constituted worlds, but these are severely, catastrophically constrained.
Language in the Cave appears to normalize its relation to other media

in the sense that graphic inscription can, in the Cave, be experienced as,
apparently, suspended in space without being represented as on a surface.
However, this is an artificial state of affairs, an illusion, an appearance.
All of the light in the Cave is on some surface or other. Neither is there
any other media-constituted world (or, more accurately, no such world
yet) where humans live and to which we might retreat to hold up some
surfaceless instance of graphic language so as to compare it, visually, with
its representation in the Cave. Rather, when we experience language in the
Cave, we are starkly, literally, confronted with the diegetic break on which
language depends and by means of which we make it and it makes us as we
write and read. We are brought face to—literal, spectral (sur)—face with
the strange relationship between language and media, between language
and its embodiment in the worlds that media provide. In order for it to
be language, language cannot be a coherent part of any media-constituted
world in which it is inscribed. Without both the irresistible gravity of the
leaf and the break that frees it from all gravity, language cannot exist in this
or any other world, let alone make art.
9
Writing to Be Found
and Writing Readers
One
In order to begin to write this chapter, I set out to make some appropriate
use of what I have come to think of as “writing to be found.” Originally
I had thought that this would be by way of simply beginning to write,
embarking on my usual process of writing while checking, periodically, to
see whether the sequences of words that I was in the midst of composing
were still “found” in the corpus and then at what point they became “not yet
found.”1 How many words would I have to add, composing my syntagmatic
sequences, before they were not found in the corpus of language to which
the Google search engine gives me access, before they were, perhaps, original
sequences? How difficult would I find it to produce unfound sequences?
Would I be able to continue to write as I usually write once I was aware
that, at some perhaps unanticipated moment, the words I write are suddenly
penetrating and constituting the domain of sequences that are not yet found
in our largest, most accessible corpus of written English?
There have proven to be many questions raised by any and all of my
attempts to engage with these processes and their contexts. Moreover,
I remain convinced that many of these processes may be productive of
significance and affect, to an extent that will allow aesthetic, not only
critical, practices some purchase.
This way of working with language is enabled by unprecedented,
convenient, and articulable access to the network, a world of language, a
media-constituted diegesis, that is still “powered”—as the contemporary
technologically inflected usage would have it—by text, by encoded
representations of inscription, in what we usually call writing. The net is still
largely composed from all the privileged instantiations of our languages’
singular materialities that we, as irrepressible language-makers, have so far
written to be found.
By which I mean, to make it clearer, that when I write with these processes,
I’m both writing, and writing with Google.2 Is Google my collaborator?
Does Google become the space within which I write? I want to make it
clear that I don’t consider myself necessarily to be writing in the space of
the network nor collaborating (directly) with other artists. At this point, I
also want to make it clear that I do not consider myself to be using Google,
not, at least, in the usual way that Google is used for gathering instances
of language by search. I’m not refashioning myself as a Flarfist.3 I’m not
casting a faux-puerile, post-everything, absurdist net over the net using the
net, gathering glittering detritus, spectacular disjuncture, in endless anti-
syntactic listlings. I’m not composing searches in order to find the language
for what I’m making. I’ve got my language already, one way or another. I
just want to know whether it’s found or it isn’t. The Flarf-poetic approach
is—although this is only a small part of Flarf—a détournement of the
affordances that Google offers us as a portal to text on the network. My
“writing to be found,” on the other hand, is in itself a way of writing that
is shaped by the way that Google is shaped, by the way in which Google
curves the space of the network. And Google does also, in a sense, write
with me: constraining, directing, guiding, and, especially, punctuating my
writing.
It occurs to me, broadening the scope of these experiments’ relevance,
that poetic writing for programmable and network media seems to have
been captivated by the affordances of new media and questions of whether
or not and if so, how certain novel, advanced, media-constituted properties
and methods of literary objects require us to reassess and reconfigure
the literary itself. What if we shift our attention decidedly to practices,
processes, procedures—toward ways of writing and ways of reading rather
than dwelling on either textual artifacts themselves (even when considered
as time-based literary objects) or the concepts underpinning such objects
as artifacts? What else can we do, given that we must now write on, for,
and with the net which is itself no object but a seething mass of manifold
processes? Google itself signals the significance of process since Google both
is and is not the net. Google is not the inscription that forms the matter of
the net. Google is merely (almost) everyprocess (not everything) that makes
it possible for us to find and touch and consume what was always already
there in front of us.
When you collaborate, you are more or less obliged to get to know
your collaborator. Getting to know Google better, in a practical sense,
as a collaborator, is one of the most interesting results to emerge from
even the relatively simple and preliminary processes that have been set
in train.
This is probably the moment to introduce some details of the procedures
with which I am writing. First, a classical epithet via Montaigne in John
Florio’s translation,
WRITING TO BE FOUND AND WRITING READERS 135
The Philosopher Chrisippus was wont to foist-in amongst his bookes,

not only whole sentences and other long-long discourses, but whole
bookes of other Authors, as in one, he brought Euripides his Medea. And
Apollodorus was wont to say of him, that if one should draw from out his
bookes what he had stoln from others, his paper would remaine blanke.
Whereas Epicurus cleane contrarie to him in three hundred volumes he
left behind him, had not made use of one allegation.4
Process: Write into the Google search field with text delimited by quote
marks until the sequence of words is not found. Record this sequence. Delete
words from the beginning of the sequence until the sequence is found. Then
add more words to the end of the sequence until it is not found. Repeat. Each
line of the resultant text (although not necessarily the last line) will comprise
a sequence of words that is “not yet found.” At the time of composition,
these lineated sequences of words had not yet been indexed by Google and
were thus, in a certain (formal) sense, original:
If I write, quoting,
I write, quoting, “And”
write, quoting, “And the”
quoting, “And the earth”
“And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon
the face of the deep,” these words
“upon the face of the deep,” these words will
“deep,” these words will be found
these words will be found. Perhaps
will be found. Perhaps they will now
Perhaps they will now always
they will now always be found
will now always be found. I
always be found. I write
be found. I write, in part
I write, in part, in the hope that what
in the hope that what I write will be found.
[with Google, Saturday October 3, 2009, completed 2:04am EST.]
I was induced to explore this way of writing by the remarks of a philosopher

and cognitive scientist, Ron Chrisley, at a workshop on neuroesthetics.5 In
discussing robotic perception, he was making some use of the concept of the
“edge of chaos.” I understood this phrase loosely as referring to a threshold
of information processing, the point at which an artificial cognizer can no
longer assimilate—typically by compression or by rule formulation—the
information that comprises its inputs.6 Somehow, to me, this suggested or
rhymed with that moment in our now common encounters with search
engines when what we are looking for is not yet found, when it could still
be anything, because, as yet, it is nothing to the corpus. It isn’t there. It
isn’t in any way predictable. It’s still maximal, raw information in Shannon-
Weaver’s sense—the edge of chaos that we are about to make, literally,
readable.
Since I have some practical experience with Markov models for text
generation, I also pretend to recognize this as a closely related phenomenon.7
If we think of Google as giving us access to a vast Markov model, I believe
I am right in saying that as I build up my sequences of words delimited by
quotes and test them after adding each word, I am testing the model’s ability
to be able to find me an n-gram where n is equal to the number of words
in my sequence. Non-zero results mean that there are probabilities to play
with. Not only is it the case that other people before me have produced
instances of this sequence of words, but an n-gram model, constructed from
the Google corpus, would also have some chance of generating my search
phrase. However, once I’ve reached an unfound sequence, the model breaks
down. I’m at the edge, and I may also, perhaps, be about to extend, by
some minuscule amount, the readable, the unchaotic territory of the textual,
perhaps even that of the literary. I’m about to write, and to add my own
writing to the corpus.
And then suddenly it gets interesting. I was just writing, and now I’m
writing with Google and beginning to wonder what that means. Google
is where we search for language and for forms of all kind that are made
from language, including aesthetic forms. It’s become our default portal to
the default corpus. It is not yet all writing, but we feel that we are close
to the historical moment when the extraordinary possibility—Ted Nelson’s
docuverse—has become an actuality for, at least, a major portion of the
existing textual corpus of writing in English. Already, I wager, we type our
searches into Google expecting that it will find anything and everything
that we might expect to be found in the world of letters, of conventionally
inscribed textuality. What do I mean by that? I mean at least all of those
sequences of words that have been written by authors who are known to us.
All of the writing that is known, all of the writing that will have been found.
And much besides.
The purpose of this writing is to address

an edge of chaos.
Specifically, the point or points
in sequences of words that
delimit phrases
found to be unique in our
most accessible corpus.
[with Google, Saturday October 3, 2009, completed 10:27am EST.]

The two singularly lineated sentences above are made with a slightly
different process, a retreat from the not yet found sequence—at the time
this was, for example, “The purpose of this writing is to address an”—to
the longest sequence that was still found in the accessible Google corpus.
Although the sentences are original to me, they are expressed in phrases
that can be shown to be plagiarized from the corpus. They have all already
been written.
For we do seem to be addressing something like the palpable, objective
edge of authorial originality. “The purpose of this writing is to address”
was always unoriginal before I set out. When I wrote, “The purpose of this
writing is to address an,” the indefinite article made me an author.
Those of us who are educators will be aware of the way that Google and
other search engines are used as simple detectors of student plagiarism. Type
the suspected sentence into Google and it is very likely to find the source
from which it may have been copied. Writing to be found with Google
reveals, however, the singular, perhaps unprecedented nature of its, Google’s,
co-authorial authority. By definition Google changes shape. As we’ve said
before, it’s a process. By providing access Google seems to be the corpus of
reference while remaining a protean manifold of processes that continually
reconfigure themselves while crawling over our networked body of language
(the actual corpus), even unto the edge of chaos, finding new readable things
and indexing them relentlessly and swiftly, remarkably swiftly. Less than
three hours after I’d posted my not-yet-found texts to the netpoetics blog,
they were suddenly found. Thus, taking the same text and putting it through
the same procedure produced an entirely different text and a new measure
(or textual visualization) of my originality.
Returning to my first process, with the supply text just quoted, for
example:
The purpose of this writing is to address an

is to address an edge of
address an edge of chaos.
[completed with Google at 9:17 EST on October 1, 2009, became:]
The purpose of this writing is to address an edge

is to address an edge of chaos.
a little over two hours later at 11:30 on the same day. (By the way,
although the second iteration of the process reduces the number of unfound
sequences in this initial extract; for the entire supply text, the second iteration
actually increased the total number of unfound sequences from 17 to 21.)
This potential for iteration was not only expected, but it was something
with which I desired to experiment, using it to produce a series of texts,
evolving over time in relation to the findability of their constituent sequences

of words.
But imagine my surprise when I tried the procedure again and found it
regenerating the earlier version. My new, original writing was no longer
found. I could see it there in the corpus (at netpoetics), but as far as Google,
the “index of reference,” was concerned it was, apparently, no longer there.
I could not yet have produced it. Uncanny. But easily explained by my
arbitrary access, at the first instance of checking, to Google servers that had
already published the indexing of their busy spiders. Later, I had been less
lucky: my client must have connected to other servers (I have no obvious
control over this) onto which the new indexes had not yet propagated.
Google had temporally denied my originality, my authority. It had changed
the shape of my authorial persona. I wasn’t writing with it. It was writing
with me, against me, withholding what I thought I had inscribed.
Two
Why hadn’t I considered this before? Why don’t we think of it now, and
then more often? As a culture, we are in the seemingly ineluctable process
of handing over the digitization and indexing of our entire surviving
published textual legacy to Google, in order for them to include that part
of it which they have not already indexed. I, we, have no idea how they are
going to index our literature or how their indexing of it might change over
time. On the other hand, there is considerable evidence of uncertainty and
inconsistency.8
I should of course mention in passing that there are already and will likely
remain some checks and balances to Google. So far, the other internet search
engines have access to most of the same corpus, and they do not index this
corpus in the same way.9 Without huge investment we could all write and
set up our very own search engines. Nonetheless it is remarkable the degree
to which Google has become, as I say, initially the search engine of reference
and now in some sense the reference of reference. This is so obvious to us
that it has become banal to point out that whatever else Google is, it may
be the most remarkable and significant agency for cultural change on the
planet.
Of course, the scholars among us (and within us) will defer. We cannot
rely on anything that the folksonomic internet provides, although relying,
admittedly “by default,” is exactly what all of us having access actually do.
Neither can we defer from Google in the same way that we defer from
Wikipedia, on the basis of what it “contains.” Google is not Wikipedia and, in
a sense, it does not contain anything. Practically and in other critical senses,
it stands between us and Wikipedia while also providing—in so far as it
indexes all the writing that can be found—much of the material from which
Wikipedia is built. Wikipedia is something that arose contemporaneously
with the Googlization of everything but is more a symptom than a cause.
Whatever Google is, it is a problem that remains to be addressed, and
written with.
Here is one brief working statement of what Google is becoming or what
it may already be: Google is the preferred or default agency to which our
existing institutions of cultural production and critique delegate the symbolic
processing of our inscribed material culture in exchange for unprecedented
access to the results of that symbolic processing. I am, of course, bracketing
all the important questions concerning what exactly is handed over to
Google for processing, how is this done, who owns it, and where it is—all
of which are irreversibly complicated by the fact that any answers will be
radically different “before” and “after” these processes that were already in
train long “before” any actual exchanges—such as agreements to digitize
libraries—were made explicit, let alone regulated in any publicly agreed and
articulated manner.
Let’s say it again in more polemical terms. We hand over our culture to
Google in exchange for unprecedented and free access to that culture. We
do this all but unconscious of the fact that it will be Google that defines
what “unprecedented” and “free” ultimately imply.10 As yet, we hardly
seem to acknowledge the fact that this agreement means that it is Google
that reflects our culture back to us. They design the mirror, the device,
the dispositive, as the French would put it. They offer a promise of “free”
access in many senses of that word, including zero cost to the end-using
inquirer and close to zero cost to the institutions that supply the inscribed
material culture that Google swallows and digests. But Google does not
(some might here add “any longer”) conceal the fact that this free access
does come at a cost, another type of cost, one that is also a culture-(in)
forming cost: Google will process all (or nearly all) this data in order to sell
a “highly cultivated” positioning of advertisements. The deal can’t go ahead
without this underlying engine of commerce and commercialization. In a
sense, Google is the predominant global corporation, a major proportion
of whose capital is literally cultural capital. Now, what was already a huge
backing investment is being freely augmented by the traditional investors
in this market of culture, the universities in particular. Bizarrely, these
institutional investors are not asking for shares in the business, or rights to
vote on the board. All they seem to want is to have what they already had,
but processed, indexed, reformed, and reflected back to them, to us, in, as I
say, a manner that allows many of us unprecedented access.
This is not, primarily, a chapter about Google, and the situation was and
is far more complicated than this polemical outline suggests. Google did,
after all, emerge from the popular culture that was born on the internet itself,
long (in net history terms) before institutions began to contribute to this
culture to any significant extent. Thus the initial cultural capital that Google
amassed may be seen as fairly won, and the access that Google provided
to a suddenly vast, ever-accumulating resource was truly unprecedented,
rendering the culture of the net useable, manageable, findable, beyond all
expectation.11 We learned quickly that “unprecedented access” meant that
Google was better than any other agency at managing the “more than ever
before” of everything that is digitally inscribed, the exponential increase in
information. But now this simple, if overwhelming, quantitative fact is all
that we and our institutions know with any surety. We know that Google
will deal with the scale of it all, and manage it all better, and give more of
it back to us,12 but we may never know, unless we ask or demand, exactly
how they do this or how they will or will not do this in some speculative
future when they have already disposed of the problems of processing it
all, displacing it all, continually rendering it back to us through manifold
devices with post-human artificial intelligences.13
Three
So now all my writing to be found has been recast in the light of this shared,
would-be universal engagement or struggle with Google to retrieve or
reform culture. And immediately, as in the work of writing digital media that
underlies these remarks, I return to specifics with a heightened awareness of
their potential significance, especially as critique of these relations.
For example, in the course of investigating writing to be found, it
occurred to me that any material that is quoted in a text from a well-known,
and therefore much indexed, source will emerge very differently in the
procedures outlined above. It seems that in what may be standard original
composition, you can expect sequences of words that you are writing to be
found to be unique after about five words, depending on diction. However,
arbitrarily long sequences of words recalled or quoted from many texts, like
the English Bible in one of the standard translations, will already and will
always be found by Google. The conceptualist in you might want to test
this to some absurd aesthetic extreme, typing all of Genesis into the Google
search box delimited by quotes and discovering thousands of hits. I didn’t
get this far, although I made attempts with lengthy sequences until I noticed,
in light grey type, the legend14:
“what” (and subsequent words) was ignored because we limit queries to

32 words.
I hadn’t noticed or been aware of this limitation before. And I am still unsure
about when and how it was instituted. How long had this been a Google
limitation? Who decided it was needed and why? Why thirty-two words?
It’s clearly not surprising that this limitation exists. The point here is that
it gets in the way of using or, in my case, writing with Google in the way I
believed would be interesting and might lead to further aesthetic or critical
cultural production. What if I wanted to continue with what I had hoped
and planned to do? Google’s got indexes to my language, my culture. Even if
they might not reasonably be expected to give me all the tools I might need
or want to explore this material, why should they constrain or reform the
tools that they do appear to give me in ways that seem to me to be arbitrary
or, at least, unrelated to my own concerns? These questions are already
important but not as important as they will become. When Google indexes
all books, which institutions will keep track of when and why they change
their search algorithms, let alone endeavor to influence Google’s decisions
in such matters?15
Never mind, for my immediate purposes at least. Conceptually, I
can imagine what the search results would have been for absurdly long
sequences from famous texts and how, using writing to be found procedures
for lineation, texts that quoted or plagiarized such material (let’s say,
writing to be found punctuating certain texts of Kathy Acker or Pierre
Menard’s Quixote or Kent Johnson’s Day),16 would be chopped up where
they are “original” and then bulge out where they incorporated what is
already found, as the “If I write, quoting … ” example above demonstrates.
(Menard’s Quixote would be all “bulge.”)
I say “never mind,” but remain disturbed. A productive engagement had
been interrupted by a (ro)bot from Porlock and now this seems as if it will
be characteristic of writing and working with Google, re-energizing the
Anglo-Saxon origins of that preposition. In fact, of course, it is a function
of encoded properties and methods that are designed to reassert, where and
whenever necessary, the underlying purposes of the Google engine, which
is, as we recall, to dispose of culture and propose advertisements based
on this disposal. Google asserts: “You don’t need more than 32 words in
your queries in order to determine what you want and what interests you.
Making something that requires longer searches will simply skew our data
and make it harder for us to know what you want.”
Despite Google’s assertion, I keep searching. Now my collaborator,
Daniel C. Howe, and I keep searching. We’ve already, like many others,
come up against another important limit. If you search too much or too fast
(even manually I found), then Google’s engine thinks you might be a process
(as it is) and that you might be making automated queries. This produces the
same threat to Google’s underlying purpose, the threat of skewed analytical
data. However, to us it seems as if we are simply retrieving access to our
own linguistic culture. Usually, we are simply mining the corpus that Google
makes accessible—in an unprecedented manner—for “natural language
data.” In writing to be found, I seek out the chaotic edge of what is being
written and is soon to be found by myself and others, the edge of what
literary culture acknowledges to be attributable authorship.17 Isn’t this a
legitimate engagement with what Google promises us? Shouldn’t these
admittedly or purportedly poetic queries be accepted as a part of the culture
with which they also engage?
As a matter of fact, we continue to write programs that generate
automated queries and it is strange that Google—itself a vast conglomeration
of processes—rejects them as such. Shouldn’t Google be prepared to pass
judgment as to whether a process is an innocent cultural address to its
services rather than assume that any automated inquiry is an attempt to
undermine or deflect it from its prime, commercial objective?18 Returning
to a concrete example that engages related concerns with poetics and the
author function, I realized that using the Google search query’s “not” prefix
(a minus sign) I might search for sequences of words from well-known texts
(delimited by quote marks) that would be found in the corpus but in places
where they were not associated with their well-known “authors.” I used
this negatively qualified version of the procedure described above, testing
successively longer sequences and aiming to find the longest sequences that
also satisfied the essential condition of not being attributed to the famous
author. This produces a text that, paradoxically, is collaged from phrases
that are quoted from arbitrary internet unknowns but which, when linked
together, will compose a famous text. Before supplying an actual example, I
want simply to point out that the program I write to undertake this entirely
legitimate chapter in conceptual poetics generates a large number of test
searches even for a brief text and it will find itself frequently blocked by
Google’s suspicion of and ultimate denial of my own process’s high cultural
intentions.19
“blue and white of sky”a “a moment still”b “April morning in the”c “mud
it’s over”d “it’s done I’ve had the”e “image the scene is”f “empty a few”g
“animals still then”h “goes out no more”i “blue I stay”j “there way off
on”k “the right in the mud”l “the hand opens and closes”m “that helps
me it’s”n “going let it go I”o “realize I’m still smiling”p “there’s no sense
in that now”q “been none for a long time now”r “my tongue comes out”s
“again lolls”t “in the mud i stay”u “there no more”v “thirst the tongue”w
“goes in the mouth”x “closes it must be a”y “straight line now it’s”z “over
it’s done I’ve had”aa “the image”bb
This is Beckett, three fragments from How It Is which also correspond to the
final part of a short prose work he originally published in French as l’Image.
But it is also possible to assert that is not Beckett but rather something that
I have written together with Google, where we have conspired to calculate
a maximal syntagmatic association with Beckett’s texts while ensuring that
these sequences are attributable to others, often many others, and we do this
in a manner that can be established by a contemporary form of citation. It

is a relatively nice problem to consider whether this text infringes copyright.
I might claim, for example, that it is not copied, that it’s not even the
same text, especially given that I have transcribed it with quotation marks
around the phrases. A copyright expert might assert that it was created
by a mechanical process, that it is the product of a procedural but regular
form of transcription and is, therefore, a copy, to which I would have to
reply that a great deal of personal thought and significant indeterminate
and unmediated human labor also went into its making. The piece certainly
challenges the Beckett estate’s moral rights in respect of the text’s integrity
and its association with the author’s name. In US law these rights are not
established. In any case, I may both justly claim fair use, and also perversely
propose that my first-cited example was actually derived from the following
entirely original collage composed from fragments found to have been
written on the internet:20
“a moment still” “animals still then” “April morning in the” “blue and
white of sky” “been none for a long time now” “blue I stay” “empty a
few” “there no more” “mud it’s over” “my tongue comes out” “thirst the
tongue” “goes out no more” “goes in the mouth” “again lolls” “closes
it must be a” “straight line now it’s” “the hand opens and closes” “that
helps me it’s” “going let it go I” “realize I’m still smiling” “in the mud
I stay” “it’s done I’ve had the” “image the scene is” “there way off on”
“the right in the mud” “over it’s done I’ve had” “the image” “there’s no
sense in that now”
Clearly a lot more could, and will, be done with the procedures of writing to
be found, including with this latter variation in which one rediscovers how
much of what has been written has already been written. Google makes all
of this possible, and Google also stands in the way of these unanticipated
essays. One very significant reason to continue to work in this way is
precisely to reveal how Google and other similar agencies will reform what
they pretend to enable, and how our existing institutions that support
writing as a cultural practice will relate to the profound reformations that
must ensue.
Four
The “writing readers” within a major collaborative project in digitally
mediated literary art are underpinned by the critical, contemporary, quietly
hacktivist natural language processing and research initiated in “writing to
be found.” The Readers Project incorporates “writing with Google,” and
it also proposes performative reading as, perhaps, exemplary of how we

may write in this, our future. The collaboration, with Daniel C. Howe,
produces literary objects that have an extensive computational dimension
and will, typically, be realized as screen-based or projected works, for both
private viewing and reading, and more public exposure in installations with
distributed multimedia and/or mobile displays. As such, they are, in the
relatively small world of writing digital media, examples of a variety of
work whose real-world instantiations take some place either in the screen
real estate of net-based or personal computer–based art, or in the mediated
gallery space of digital art. Even the computational aspects of this work have
become amenable to critical attention in these days of codework, expressive
processing, and/or critical code studies.
However—and this may not be the best news for an already over-
extended critical community examining aesthetic objects that have still to
prove themselves in any wider cultural forum—crucial reading strategies
that are already encapsulated in our projects, in our quasi-autonomous
readers, are derived from precisely the kind of “writing with Google” that I
have outlined above. In other words, one of the more interesting dimensions
of these readers is that they are, in significant measure, the result of natural
language research and processing undertaken in, arguably, a sociopolitically
implicated dialogue with our predominant new devices of cultural reflection
and disposition. Of course, the readers also have other inclinations and
ambitions (apart from any jostling entry into the world of digital art). They
may prefer to offer themselves up to the open-minded literary criticism that
is often applied to works of the literary avant-garde. You can read them as
poetry or as a poetics. What I am suggesting, however, is that they may also
be read for the way that both they and their making reads and writes with
newly mediated culture, with Google in this instance.
This is a final point, a vector for both literary poiesis in digital media
and for its critical reception, but I must conclude the point with its
illustration. Here are three readers from the project, moving through and
“reading,” in some sense, an underlying text, a prose poem of my own,
“Misspelt Landings.”21 There is a mesostic reader that finds and highlights
words containing letters (which it capitalizes as it finds them) in a phrase
beginning “READING THROUGH … , ” and there are two other readers:
one that tends rightward and downward in the conventional vectors of
human reading while deviating occasionally, and one that seems to wander
while surrounding itself with a halo of erased or faded text. What is far
from obvious is that these readers, all of them, chose their next word to
read (and hence their deviations) on the basis of simple but quite effective
research on the usage of these words in the corpus to which Google gives us
access, however reluctantly. An important aspect of the way this and other
pieces from The Readers Project are deployed is that, for each such manifold
display, the readings of all the live readers are separately broadcast to a
server, a feed to which you may subscribe by accessing a URL with a browser
and with other clients under development. Subscribed to a particular reader,
you may read along with it and see clearly the textual path it has chosen,
according to its particular reading strategies.
In simple terms these readers check the proximate neighboring words of
the word they have just read and they “know”—from the results of their
writers’ struggle with Google—whether or not any or all of those proximate
words will represent likely natural language phrases.22 Daniel C. Howe and
I are the writers of these readers and we, along with other coded processes,
struggled with Google, sending queries to its “books” domain to see how
many instances of thousands of three-word phrases had already been
inscribed as writing to be found and how frequently they had been inscribed
in the net’s textual corpus, if at all.
Many of you reading this will understand that this is far from being
an entirely novel approach. However, although our readers may seem to
be following a simple Markov chain, the actual processes and models
deployed in The Readers Project conceal some significant differences to
a standard Markov model.23 More importantly and finally, these readers
were written with processes that hacked near-live statistical data out of
the Google-indexed internet corpus of all the inscribed cultural material
that can be found. Writers of readers like these could not have made
anything approaching their capabilities until very recently, or not without
huge, institutionally maintained resources. We were and are able to make
these readers remarkably up-to-the-minute in their model-driven analyses
of the texts that they were written to read. They know what they need to
know about the latest writing to be found on the net in their domain. This
knowledge was mined iteratively from the language that we all gave over and
continue to give over to Google and, in so far as Google was uninterested
in or threatened by the queries we needed to make in order to gather our
readers’ simple knowledge, that knowledge is the result of a fascinating
struggle that—for this reader at least—is a model in micro-procedure of
the struggles that we must all undertake as our institutions of culture pass
over its care and disposition to all those strange engines of inquiry that may
suddenly reject our search for writing. They reject our queries for reasons
that we may not entirely comprehend. Not yet and perhaps, not ever.
10
Weapons of the Deconstructive
Masses (WDM):
Whatever Electronic Literature
May or May Not Mean
Weapons of the Deconstructive Masses. In the midst of a desperate,

necessary call for change, it might be best to get this all over with quickly; to
admit that “There aren’t any,” and desist from any threat or preparation to
invade a sovereign field of cultural production where intellectual democracy
is always already safe.
When I began to prepare this short chapter, it was going to be by way
of those critiques which ask, “Does it matter what we call it?” Of course it
matters, or makes meaning, in the sense that words resonate and cannot be
prevented from doing so. Nonetheless, that linguistic signs derive signification
from locations within structures of differences and as a function of manifold
contexts of usage; that their material specificities are arbitrary:—these facts
are not contradicted by the revisionings of poststructuralism. Neither is
poststructuralism any kind of reliable ally for poetic law-makers who, like
Ezra Pound, seek to establish “proper names” for things, “true names,”
zhengming, a human-native tendency that he also translated from Chinese
culture where it remains equally conservative, command-expressive, and
poetically exacting, and also every bit as profoundly constraining and
cultural-absolutist as it would be in some Poundian West. I mean to say
that, within the systems and structures of language, names are put forward
and are used—and they come to signify what they signify, to mean what
they mean. Deconstruction can’t do anything about this except to play in
the slippages and gesture toward ruptures and anomalies, making différance
without necessarily making any difference.
Bizarrely, the etymological and associative play of deconstruction is

formally and, I would argue, significantly and affectively resonant with
the same play that one finds in—as the epicentric example—Pound’s later
“ideogrammic” work. In The Cantos, Pound creates poetic ideograms
from shards and fragments of transcultural, translingual etymology and
association in order to establish the “sincerity” of true names, with “the
sun’s lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally.”1 Derrida performs
in precisely the same way, but so as to question, within writing, within the
discourse of philosophy, the possibility that writing can ever produce any
kind of “proper” signification.
All this is simply to give you some idea of where I might have been and, to
a certain extent, still am coming from. But more importantly, this preamble
rhymes with my final paragraphs, where we are again confronted with a
disturbing contradiction between literary nostalgia or longing for what I
later call “persistent form,” and cultural inclinations which are formless
or polymorphically and transmedially associative beyond anything we
have yet encountered. I will still briefly take up the question of whether
“electronic literature” is a proper name for the field in which many of us are
now engaged, as both practitioners and critics, but I will go on to address
at least two other matters which, for me, follow on from these issues of
naming but which are, I believe, of greater moment. I want to try and write
about some of the strategies and/or tactics that we, as a cultural collective—
institution even—may wish to consider when delineating our relations with
both literary and art practice, including critical and pedagogic practice.
Finally, I would like to address some of the broader cultural and intellectual
changes that I see taking place, specifically those that are highlighted by
these considerations of naming and of cultural strategy.
Naming
As a matter of historical fact—and not only in the United States—“electronic
literature” has emerged as a preferred term, one now destined to survive
even my own attempts at deconstruction, especially since the publication
of N. Katherine Hayles watershed, digestible, CD-equipped, all-in-one
critical review, come constructive textbook, come seminal polemic, come
new theoretical framework: Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the
Literary.2 Thus, whereas we never had “steam literature,” or “electric
literature,” or “telephonic” or “televisual literature”—at least not of
any cultural moment or persistence—we have already had “electronic
literature” for a remarkably long time, especially given the hyperhistory
of new media development. If by electronic literature we mean practices
of writing in networked and programmable media—what I have always
WEAPONS OF THE DECONSTRUCTIVE MASSES (WDM) 149
tended to call it—then we are likely to have an “electronic literature” for

some time to come. However, we will have to bury the material-metaphoric
implications of “electronic” precisely because the use of this adjective
misdirects our critical and theoretical attentions. Writing in networked
and, especially, programmable media weans us off even the traditional
attachments of literature to particular forms of material cultural support: all
the predominant and authoritative cultural formations that cluster around
paper and printing and “the book.” We are not out to replace one privileged
material cultural support for another and so we must metaphorically bury
“electronic” and must do so in the full critical awareness that, over a
much longer period, a number of similar literary qualifiers indicating other
material cultural supports were buried long before it. Literature has never
been, for any of us, just “literature.” Without needing this ever to be said,
it has been predominantly, successively, concurrently “oral literature” or
“manuscript literature” or “book literature,” and so on. Recently, Hayles and
other theorists, notably Alan Liu, are turning to a notion of “the literary,”
perhaps driven in part by unconscious or unacknowledged anxieties that
literature may never be able to slough off the privileges entailed by some
form of contingent material support.3 For Hayles “the literary” is something
like the potential articulation of symbolic feedback loops within complex,
aesthetically motivated structures that “intermediate” human and non-
human cognizers and agencies, themselves emergently self-organized in
“dynamic heterarchies.” Her theoretical framework provides a necessary
revisioning of our brave new world and looks toward “the literary” as
one way to embrace and articulate this vision, while acknowledging that
the resulting “electronic literature” may be at a loss for words let alone
paper to write them on.4 For Liu, since the advent of the graphic browser,
culture generally, and literature in particular, is already long since swamped,
overlooked, and downplayed by the “cool” detachment that disregards a
committed, materially supported poiesis. It’s hard to be cool about making
things, especially poetic things, especially poetry. It’s even harder to be cool
when reading poetry itself (as opposed to the cool theory that may envelop
or disguise some of it), privately and particularly in public. Literature is
uncool; while “the literary” has, at least, an outside chance of looking good
and trading up. In the world of poetry, for example, while literature skulks
in the academy, you can apply “the literary” to everything from rap, to
spoken word, to open mic, to conceptual poetics, to “epoetry,” whatever
any of these may or may not mean.
Ultimately then, our problem and focus will prove to be not so much
concerned with the qualifications of its various qualifiers, such as
“electronic,” but with literature itself. Rather than attempting to identify
the specificities of a certain variety of literature or the literary, we must turn
to questions—this is precisely what Hayles does in her book—of how the
aesthetic viability (or not) of this newly mediated literary practice recasts
literature itself and how this impacts on artistic culture broadly addressed.
Liu’s approach contrasts tellingly. Hayles accepts, more or less as a given,
that there is a viable electronic literature and that we are (therefore) obliged
to address its specificities and challenges. Liu is radically uncertain about the
position of literature and the literary in what he sees as the now predominant,
overarching “culture of information.” In this—our contemporary—culture
he discovers “cool” as a (perhaps the) prime aesthetic operator. As a backdrop
to my argument, I’m required to knit together a number of citations from
Liu’s book that will provide a somewhat troubling delineation of this term
in his insightful usage. “Cool” information troubles literature and seems to
render it “uncool” in proportion to its redefinition culture itself.
Cool is the aporia of information. In whatever form and on whatever

scale (…), cool is information designed to resist information—not so
much noise in the information theory sense as information fed back
into its own signal to create a standing interference pattern, a paradox
pattern. Structured as information designed to resist information, cool is
the paradoxical “gesture” by which an ethos of the unknown struggles to
arise in the midst of knowledge work.5
What is the future of the literary when the true aestheticism unbound of
knowledge work—as seen on innumerable Web pages—is “cool”? Cool
is the techno-informatic vanishing point of contemporary aesthetics,
psychology, morality, politics, spirituality, and everything. No more
beauty, sublimity, tragedy, grace, or evil: only cool or not cool.6
But “cool,” for Liu, also indicates an aporia that might paradoxically provide
a solution to his aesthetic aporia.
What transitional aesthetics can bridge the rift between class-based and
classless aesthetics, between a “distinction” of literature that is now dying
and its resurrection in a new body or form? Or, in a less utopian voice,
what aesthetics can represent itself to itself as transitional in this manner?
My argument is that the answer inheres in the avowed aesthetics of
contemporary knowledge workers: “cool.”7
The problem remains (more on this below) that he cannot see how the
contemporary artistic practice of literature, even an electronic or digital
literature, can become a part of this process of aesthetic transformation in,
shall we say, a theoretically unified way.
Before proceeding, we must also be a little clearer about how we
qualify those literary practices that currently bear the epithet “electronic.”
Unsurprisingly, this hinges on some understanding of the methods and
properties of artistic practice itself, especially those we may characterize
as “literary.” In so far as artists identify as literary—without further

qualifier—a distinct, established tradition of practice and criticism is able
to examine their explicit claims as well as those that remain implicit in the
work. In so far as artists engage in more novel practices of language art-
making and in so far as they appear to share such practices with others,
the designation of these practices becomes a matter of negotiation. While
resisting the potential overdetermination of past concepts and forms, we do
have to find appropriate, and necessarily abstracted, abbreviated phrases
for processes and things that, even now, we do not yet entirely comprehend.
Both “electronic literature” and the all but insignificantly preferable
alternative “digital literature” imply that there is a “variety,” a “branch,”
“a faction,” or, perhaps even a “genre” of “literature” (problematic in itself,
since Flaubert and long before new media, according to Barthes in Writing
Degree Zero) that is distinguished by the characteristics of the material
from which it is made or the media in which it is realized, rather than
the procedures of its generation. Both terms tend to substantiate literary
production, to highlight the (finished) product (that always already has a
past, a history), rather than (a continuing, emerging, developing) practice.
For some years I have tried to make a point of highlighting practice by using
the slightly roundabout phrase “writing in networked and programmable
media.”8 As a matter of pedagogic pragmatism I now also encourage
the shorter “writing digital media,” the WDM of my title, a phrase in
which there also hovers a cloud of pronouns and less-articulate possible
relationships between writing and digital media: writing [in] digital media;
writing [for] digital media; writing [transitive] digital media. But this is, as
I say, pragmatism, part of what is a necessarily collective approach within
which terms will continue to emerge and fade away along with “electronic
writing” or “electronic literature.” In these latter terms, the reference to
material support will become invisible, folded into the designation as
programmable electronics—gradually, steadily, then exponentially—
become ubiquitous. The material and metaphoric overtones will simply die.
We should be more concerned, as we will see, with what may or may not
die with them.
The literary
I want to return now to the problem of “the literary” and its critique
in networked and programmable media, to the question of culturally,
historically established forms and how these interrelate with writing digital
media. Here, “writing,” as opposed to “literature,” allows me to link forward
to a demonstration of how—as I see it—underlying, persistent, perhaps even
necessarily persistent, forms determine art practices as literary.9
It is fascinating, if disturbing, to witness the parallel retreat from

“literature” to “the literary” in two of our most important critics. Hayles
recovers “the literary” and establishes “electronic literature” as an elaborate
function of the cyborgization of posthuman cultures. It is as if “writing”
will provide an aesthetic and cognitive proving ground for an inevitable
technological reconfiguration of culture and society generally. Liu, all
but overwhelmed by “cool” new media art, admits to being at a loss: “I
think literature will indeed have a place in a new-media world otherwise
dominated by the design, visual, and musical arts. But what the eventual
nature and position of literature will be among the convergent data streams
of the future is something I do not yet know how to theorize.”10 This is,
dateline c. 2001 ACE, the final epilogic position of a self-identified literary
scholar after 500-odd pages of highly engaged, closely argued examination
of contemporary cultural production in fields closely allied to our own. Both
approaches make it difficult—two times harder—for me to put forward a
theory of my own and still find appropriate recent support or authority.
What you get and what follows is a practitioner’s view, with some ties to
critical and theoretical writings that I have found necessary or useful.
Earlier above, I pointed out that, within traditional discourse, “literature”
has no need to specify its material cultural supports. These are assumed. We
still live and breathe and write within the culture of the book. The usages of
“writing,” I argue, allow a similar adherence to preferred, persistent form,
while remaining actively open to the emergence of new forms. This is one of
the arguments that makes us prefer, for example, the term “writing digital
media” to “electronic literature.” The former preserves formal values while
allowing that they will only ever be a function of cultural practice. They can
be assumed, but they are not necessarily inherited, as of proper(ty) right(s).
But whence the implicit formal conservatism of “writing”? There is always
already so much evidence of nostalgia for the forms of literary material
culture, emanating even from the pens [sic] of the most sophisticated and
prescient critics. Not long before Liu was becoming literally overwhelmed
by new media cool in a manner that remains both cool and relevant, Jacques
Derrida was also speculating on writing and the “the book to come” in a
way that may belie any sense that his theory and critique predates and so
has less relevance to a literary or linguistic philosophy of new media. In
1996, Derrida points out, “It was well before computers that I risked the
most refractory texts in relation to the norms of linear writings. It would be
easier for me now to do this work of dislocation or typographic invention—
of graftings, insertions, cuttings, and pastings.”11 Thus, it was more or less at
the precise moment that hypertext was visibly instantiating poststructuralist
thinking on the web, that Derrida went on to say,
I’m not very interested in that any more from that point of view and in
that form. That was theorized and that was done—then. The path was
broken experimentally for these new typographies long ago, and today
it has become ordinary. So we must invent other “disorders,” ones that
are more discreet, less self-congratulatory and exhibitionist, and this time
contemporary with the computer.12
In the late 1990s Derrida maintains his adherence to a practice of avant-garde,

deconstructivist literary “disorder”—exceeding non-linear hypertext—
while, at the same time, reimagining the book in terms of irreducible cultural
fantasy, where the end of the book may also be something quite opposite:
These are two fantasmatic limits of the book to come, two extreme, final,
eschatic figures of the end of the book, the end as death, or the end as
telos or achievement. We must take seriously these two fantasies; what’s
more they are what makes writing and reading happen. They remain as
irreducible as the two big ideas of the book, of the book both as the unit
of a material support in the world, and as the unity of a work or unit of
discourse (a book in the book).13
The two ends together—death and the achievement of writing—are what

make writing and reading happen. Writing isn’t writing without an end,
without death. In another article of roughly the same period, important
for our discussion, Derrida confesses his ultimate attachment to media
remarkably similar to Ted Nelson’s permascroll—a “paper emulator” if ever
there was one14:
when I dream of an absolute memory … my imagination continues to

project this archive on paper. Not on a screen … but on a strip of paper. A
multimedia band, with phrases, letters, sound, and images: it’s everything,
and it would keep an impression of everything. A unique specimen from
which copies would be taken. Without me even having to lift my little
finger. I wouldn’t write but everything would get written down, by itself,
right on the strip.15
Derrida’s nostalgic attachment to a scroll of paper may appear uncool, but

this vision of his own multimedia permascroll—“[o]n paperless paper”16—
is also deeply cool (“information designed to resist information”;17 paper
imagined to resist paper). Derrida sees clearly that writing (and reading)
is the key, writing as the record of what we are, or, rather, what we will
have been after we are gone. For a culture to acknowledge our existence, to
register and archive whatever it is we will have been, there must be some way
for us to write ourselves, some arbitrary material cultural support, a cultural
practice of inscription, and a cultural fantasy of successful inscription
to drive the whole machine. These will all be historically determined, of
necessity. A paper scroll may not be the ultimate medium, but (at least until
the Kurzweilian “Singularity”) a person from Derrida’s and our own age
must believe that writing on paper will always, at least, be legible.
I’m using Derrida to reinforce and authorize our sense that there is
an important, irreducible relationship between writing and historically
determined material culture. I use Derrida, in particular, in order to establish
this relationship as one that will be appreciated as both critically and
theoretically sophisticated and as allied with innovative, experimental, and
emergent cultural formations. But now I need to put forward a proposition
concerning the relationship between writing and persistent form which
seems to me compelling and consonant with that between writing and
material culture, but which is not, in any way that is obvious to me, a
necessary consequence of this or any other immediate relation. Rather it
is a consequence of language, of the specifically human form of symbolic
manipulation and interaction. Because they are universal to, if not definitive
of, the human, practices of language require historically persistent forms in
order be able to yield their significance and affect—the meanings and the
aesthetic values with which they may be inscribed—more than in the case
of symbolic manipulation in other media. Language cannot be writing, a
fortiori literary writing, without a form that persists beyond some simple
act of artifactual conception. My proposition might be regarded as one of
those truisms—no information without form—but I think it gains some
traction if the comparative part of the proposition—more than in the case
of other media—is conceded as something with which we can work. In
plainer words, what I’m proposing could be recast as claiming: because
everyone uses language, because everyone writes, we need more in the way
of agreed persistent form to help us decide what part of all the language and
writing that is produced has appreciable meaning and/or beauty. “More,”
that is, than in the case of practices of symbolic expression in other media
which may be technically specialized and subject to explicit disciplines and
so, somewhat paradoxically, better able to cope with formless essays by
recognized practitioners of, for example, painting, music, sound art, visual
and conceptual art, performance, and so on. To answer my question above,
“Whence the implicit formal conservatism of ‘writing?’” It has to be formally
conservative because everyone writes, not just writers.
What’s the differencing?

The above argument implies that even, or perhaps, especially in new media,
for us to be able to find and recognize “the literary,” we will have to be able to
find and recognize persistent forms, literary forms, forms of writing, which
will then allow us to appreciate “the literary” in “electronic literature.” I
am not going to shy away from this conclusion, a contentious conclusion
that is based on what?—on corroborative evidence concerning the “end of

the book,” on my consonant but fundamentally ungrounded proposition
concerning language and form, and also, of course, on the present aporia of
“the literary” in new media art practice. This penultimate section examines
some properties and methods of new media’s literary aporia; to give some
examples of how artists respond to this aporia when and if they are driven
to produce language-driven new media art, and to consider whether, in
the “end,” this aporia is nothing of the sort, whether it might be the case
that what for us seems to be a problem of “the literary” will be resolved
or dissolved in fundamental transformations of culture that are, precisely,
correspondent with the “end of the book,” its closing achievement.
This is how Alan Liu spells out the aporia, the situation, as he sees it, not
only of “the literary,” but of the “creative arts,” in the one place in his book
where he explicitly addresses electronic literature:
What is the function of the creative arts in a world of perpetually

“innovative” information and knowledge work? Of course, the
multifariousness of the forms, media, practices, and views of the
contemporary creative arts (including literature) is remarkable. … one
need only scan the voluminous Directory of resources on the Electronic
Literature Organization’s Web site or listen in on the organization’s
conferences and online events to appreciate the multiplicity of ways in
which creative writers are using digital media to try out new genres,
writing processes, and publishing methods. No adequate account of
such variety can be rendered here. Nor can there be adequate discussion
of the other, seemingly paradoxical side of the equation: that despite
its splendid variety, so much of contemporary art and literature has a
similar look and feel descended from the collages and cut-ups of the
modernist avant-garde—for example, assemblage, pastiche, sampling,
hypertext, appropriation, mixing, creolization, or, to cite one of the
dominant metaphors of recent literary history as well as hypertext fiction,
“patchwork.” As I have said, it is all mutation, remixing, and destruction.18
What Liu—a literary scholar after all—does not so much consider is any
existing difference in the cultural critical appreciation of this purported
aesthetic aporia when we compare responses to it in the world, for example,
of visual art—broadly conceived—with those in the world of literary
art—equally broadly conceived. Liu’s ultimate discomfiture with “cool”
does not obtain as strongly in the world of art. It has long been the case—
and Liu’s evocation of “the modernist avant-garde” as our most recent
pioneering exemplars of an aesthetics of destructive creativity suggests as
much—that art can be cool without ceasing to be art, without losing its
way through to some assured sense of what should be considered artistic.
When art encountered radical innovation, scholars and critics were not
driven to retreat from “art” per se and recast their responses in terms of
a troubled conception of the “the artistic.” Even today “electronic arts,”
“ars electronica” gives me, for one, less pause than “electronic literature.”
It seems precisely to be the point that Liu’s struggle with cool is a problem
for literature and literary culture. Liu cannot theorize a place for literature
in the culture of cool. Hayles requires the literary to survive and prosper by
forging cultural links with intelligent cyborgs and machines. I would like to
suggest that literature both requires and generates historical and material
cultural form to operate and that this necessity renders it uncomfortable
within a culture that is predicated on continual, arbitrary, contingent formal
innovation.
I am not, in this, saying that literature should be comfortable, nor that
it should steer clear of the rampant formal innovation that programmable
media make ever more possible and inevitable. Quite the contrary, as is
evidenced in my own practice, teaching, and in some of the examples I will
examine here. I am simply suggesting that for “the literary” to be active as
an aesthetic or interpretative framework in the course of our critical and
theoretical engagements with language-driven digital media, then we must
take account of a historical relationship to material cultural form which
is different from the corresponding relationship in respect to other artistic
practices. To bolster this claim and before moving on to examples of practice
and further final thoughts on culture, I make three hasty references. First, I
refer back to my brief discussion of Derrida’s and our own nostalgia for the
book, for paper, for formal signs of the support on which we will always
be able to have inscribed ourselves, especially after we are gone. This is a
familiar affective concern, bringing together the universal human drive to
write (by which I mean inscribe in any form, from speech to projection in
social networks) and the universal human address to mortality calling for
a lasting monument of some kind. Those of us who will not live forever
seem to be strongly driven to have written something, anything, and the
drive for this to be in some form that will continue to be read is also strong.
Second, my call for the literary to acknowledge its special relationship and to
practice in acknowledged relationship with historically established, material
cultural form, corresponds with Liu’s proposed resuscitation of “cool” in
that, for him, cool artistic practice is culturally, aesthetically engaged when
it manifests an informed historical critique as a function of its destructive
creativity.19 Finally, consider how different the practical engagement of
visual and related arts with new media formal innovation has been and
will be. Conceptual art is crucial here. Conceptual art is the art that comes
closest in its techniques to the algorithmic expressive processing that drives
digitally mediated cultural production. In this art, the underlying concept is,
fundamentally, the form. Its material cultural realization may be important
for the work’s affect and significance, but at least since the “modernist avant-
garde” as invoked by Liu, material culturally, any form will do, in that any
form might record the concept equally well. Any further meaning and beauty
of the work’s form becomes contingent without damage to its concept. The
material form simply adds to or subtracts from the ultimate significance of
the work. My point is that for “the literary” the situation is different. The
literary form is already necessarily, by definition, symbolic. It is constituted
as such. Its form cannot be entirely separated from whatever concept drives
the work. It cannot be entirely contingent. There is far less “free play” in the
formal realization of a literary work, be it mediated digitally or in any other
manifestation. Hence the paucity of literary form in “Art & Language” and
related conceptualism. Any literary aesthetic within Art & Language is—
typically—slight, and exhausted in the realization of the work. Its visual,
material form is contingent, like that of other conceptual art, but its scant
relationship to literary form further minimizes its aesthetic and constrains
its materiality to, for example, legibility. Is Jenny Holzer literary? We will
have reason to refer to her work again shortly.
Institutions for the future?

(of the book, of literature)
I want to give some examples, of work that can undoubtedly be regarded
as writing digital media and which displays and engages properties and
methods which concern us and Liu and Hayles. I will examine three works,
all by graduate students of Brown University and the Rhode Island School
of Design (RISD). Only one of the graduates could be considered a writer in
and of digital media. This is Justin Katko, then an Electronic Writing MFA
fellow at Brown. The others are graduates in Modern Culture and Media at
Brown, and at the Digital+Media graduate program at RISD. These students,
along with thirteen others, including a number of Computer Science
graduates and undergraduates, attended a course taught by Daniel C. Howe
on Advanced Programming for Digital Art and Literature. The course had
two main threads: to introduce Processing and Java to digital writers and
artists for the advancement of their programming skills, and to introduce
digital artistic and digital literary practices to interested coders. The course
was a run away success and produced a good deal of work, some of which,
as we will see, would bear serious consideration as possible candidates
for inclusion in the corpus if not the canon of “electronic literature.” This
statement would be, out of context, quite extraordinary—and this is one of
the points I’d like to make—and yet it is, I believe, sustainable and also gives
some clues to our predicament.
Expressive programming, in digital art practice generally, is taking off,
and there is now a huge body of work and experience—more work than
commensurate critique I suspect.20 Much of this work is highly technical

and demanding of skill and specialist knowledge in, at least, the realms of
programming and visual representation. The extremes of formal diversity
and innovation are tempered by the disciplines that underpin the making of
this work. I cite these practices as examples of how, in contradistinction with
digital “literary” endeavors, essays in new media expressive programming
afford its critics ways to deal with open form, and to valorize certain
approaches over others. The critic may still not be able to say what’s good
in the work, but he or she should be able to tell whether it is “trivial” or not,
as expressive programming.
However, Howe’s course was not primarily concerned with the
predominant forms of expressive programming. In line with his own
interests, the course was language- and literature-driven. Students were
obliged to make work that engaged with linguistic structures and “literary”
concerns, although admittedly, these latter were only as seriously engaged as
we engage them now—only as seriously engaged as they are, for example,
engaged by Alan Liu’s bewilderment. The remarkable fact is that this
bewilderment did not seem to obtain or to obtain in the same way for this
diverse set of students. They were all relatively happy to produce Markov-
chained text generators and Flarf-poetic Google hacks and language-driven
data-mining mapping art and sound poetry machines and Shakespeare
modulator-remixers. They were all cool and they were all, at the very least,
producing some sort of encounter with “the literary.”21
So now, I’m going to introduce you to what I consider to be either or both
the coolest of the cool or the most literary of the literary. I start with the
most literary and end with the coolest, for reasons that I hope will become
clear.
The first piece is Mémoire involontaire No. 1 by A. Braxton Soderman.22
Soderman’s piece is fairly straightforward. It has a supply text/display text
structure. The supply text is a closely composed, elegantly written record
of a childhood memory. There is no interactivity or transaction with the
reader. The text displays itself on the screen for reading, but it is subject to
continual modulation by carefully coded processes of word replacement.
Engagement with the piece is intended to be intermittent or—as Soderman
has demonstrated live—performative, with public readings from the
changing text. Soderman (in email correspondence) references an ambient
poetics put forward by Brian Kim Stefans and myself in various both critical
and creative works.23 The word replacements which activate the piece are
elaborately coded. Synonyms for the piece’s full words are sourced live using
WordNet, and the replacements are carefully parsed and integrated with the
text as seamlessly as possible, in a manner that makes a significant gesture
toward a notion of natural language representation. Generally speaking,
the brief paragraph remains uncannily readable (not just legible) despite
the replacements, and it still bears the marks of good literary writing, a
style that somehow preserves on conserves its (necessarily non-existent)

“original” memory-image. One point of the piece is, precisely, that this
memory-image was never originally in some one particular form of words,
not even after a “first” verbal formulation was composed. Apart from the
text and the replacements, the piece is also overlaid with relatively subtle
audio and visual correlatives that are designed and coded so as to inflect and
enrich the relations between memory-image and text.
I am citing this as the most literary of my examples, but it is also the piece
in which digital manipulation most directly engages with writing. It is not
only Soderman’s writing—as composition of the supply text—which renders
the piece literary; the writing produced by and represented in the piece itself,
as process, demonstrates an important relation between memory and its
inscribed representation. In Soderman’s piece this encounter remains literary
in its significance and affect, because of and not despite digital media.
Justin Katko and Clement Valla’s Yelling at a Wall: Textron Eat Shreds
is driven by Katko’s powerful lyric voice, both literally and in terms of the
literary.24 Katko records his part-improvised recital in a public architectural
amphitheater, divided by a minor roadway, opposite the banal-minor-
league-monumental edifice of Textron’s “World Headquarters.” Katko and
Valla capture and tile an electronic image of the edifice and then produce
a visualizer that is responsive to the waveforms of Katko’s acoustic
tirade, disrupting the tiles of the headquarters’ image in manner that both
corresponds to a visual representation of the sound waves, and generates
a metaphoric image of the disruption that is fervently inscribed in Katko’s
lyrics. Katko later also takes his recital and feeds it through a bespoke, Max/
MSP-coded modulator which further mimes the self-consciously disruptive
aesthetic in disjunctive sound, and this processed sound is, in turn, fed
back into the visualizer. Katko and Valla produce a complex multimedia
instrument, driven ultimately by lyric address, and tailored to a particular
site of intervention.
It’s a rich and effective piece containing a library of forms and formal
figures, most of which—such as visualization, remix, and feedback—are
precisely representative of the overwhelming diversity of cool forms which
troubles Liu. Unlike in Soderman’s piece, the literary is not inscribed as
coding, as new form. Rather, a recognized literary form, lyric address,
however strident, provides over-arching structure for the piece. It is thus
highly and properly literary, as piece of digital art, but is less literary as a
piece of writing digital media since its literary qualities are not so much a
function of the system as a generative whole.
I think that a piece like Katko and Valla’s is more consonant with what we
expect to find touted and troubled as “electronic literature,” those works in
which multimedia representation—or, if Hayles is right, intelligent machinic
re-imagination by subconscious cognitive processes with a hankering for
literary recognition—is allied with an aesthetic that is language-driven.
Pieces like Soderman’s in which the literary mechanisms are integral to the
whole of the writing are still scarce. Multimedia representation enhanced
by expressive processing is typical, and, typically, both encapsulates and
seduces the literary in digital media. It’s there, but it is overwhelmed and
consumed by its new media hostess.25 We see something cool but we stop
reading it or imagining that it might be singing to us, or spinning a tale, or
addressing our verbal memories, or offering itself to us as a closing book
that we have read and that reads us.
The Katko and Valla piece is something that we expect to find in electronic
literature, but, as culture shifts, Caleb Larsen’s variety of language-driven
work is likely to be even more widely propagated than the Katko and Valla
variety and it is, especially if we end up conceding that it is also in some way
literary, even more troubling for literature than cool representation. You
might well say that it’s cool, but it’s not.
Larsen’s Whose Life Is It Anyway? is simple.26 It’s a text generator for
Twitter, what would now be called a chatbot. As the wired world knows,
Twitter is a personalized text-based news feed. You subscribe and make a
site/identity for yourself; you update this site at indeterminate intervals with
short texts that describe what you are doing, thinking, feeling, whatever.
Other subscribers can follow your twitter and stay updated with your
updates. You can do all this by mobile phone using an easy lightweight
bridge between the developed and developing world’s currently preferred all-
but-ubiquitous communication devices and the internet. I promised another
mention of Jenny Holzer. Holzer twitters, and you can easily imagine in
what manner.27 You don’t have to subscribe. As she will have said, “THERE
IS NO POINT IN READING ANYTHING THAT YOU KNOW WILL
HAVE BEEN WRITTEN.”
Larsen’s twitter is a little different. Responding to another common
trope of the information age, his twitter assists with the oft-lamented lack
of time that information society engenders. We can program these devices
of social projection to project ourselves for us. Larsen’s Twitter account
is a crafted grammar of plausible (for Larsen) actions, thoughts, feelings,
whatever. His databases, algorithms, and grammars, along with a variety
of triggers, now tell him and everyone else what he is doing and thinking
without his having to spend or waste time on this demanding projection
of himself for his “followers.” It’s clever, it’s a critique of current and
developing mores, and it’s “cool,” we say. It’s undoubtedly language-
driven—as used to be true of the internet generally—but is it literary?
Here, Liu’s analysis may help since, as Liu would say, a “yes” answer is
only really possible if Larsen’s piece is critical and it becomes stronger
as art in so far as it is destructive, in the sense of undermining a social
practice that is the subject of its critique. Stronger as “art” I said and it
is easier to see the piece as digital art than as writing digital media, and
this is, I believe, at least in part for the reasons I’ve identified. There is
no historical form for twittering, no past literature of twitter. To know

whether twitter is literary or not is difficult for this reason at least.
Whose Life Is It Anyway? gives us other deeper cause for concern, I
believe, and this has profound literary and cultural implications. Before
taking on this cause in brief in conclusion and perhaps also to give my final
remarks a little more context, I want to comment on the quality of these three
pieces as electronic literature. It seems to me likely that they all would have
attracted considerable interest and attention if they had been produced early
in the hyperhistory of the field. I have just given them a degree of attention
that they undoubtedly deserve. They are pieces produced by younger artists
in an academic context but in many respects, they hold up well, as they
should, if we take into account their status as essays toward something
more finished, critically, relative to pieces that have been anthologized and
rendered exemplary. This kind of phenomenon is, of course, to be expected
in a still emergent field, but here I think it is also the mark of a shift in
culture toward the more generalized acceptance of expressive processing,
even in the realm of the literary where, as I have tried to show, expressive
processing’s still arguably corrosive relationship with historically persistent
form creates special difficulties for poiesis. Nonetheless, these are only three
of many interesting pieces that were produced in the course of a single
semester. This experience is now being multiplied in other related courses at
Brown and beyond. There will soon be a lot of cool electronic literature, a
contradiction in terms in most cases, but not in all. Work that is irreducibly
literary will, I suggest, insist on persistent form, and the rest will quietly
merge with cool digital art.
In my closing words, the words with which I will most closely leave you
after I interrupt this address, I want to take the opportunity to indulge in
some cultural critical speculation, some even less academically grounded and
referenced thinking. I hope you will bear with me. There will be some bases
to what I will try to briefly express, some evidence, but much of this will be
a function of my personal experience. The pedagogic anecdotes which I have
just related, the three exemplary pieces on which I have just commented,
and, especially, Larsen’s Whose Life Is It Anyway? are starting points. There
is also my recent experience of moving from the United Kingdom, where
my work was not in the academy and where my engagement with culture
as reconfigured by younger prosumers was filtered through generational
difference along with whatever pop culture happened to be accessible
to me. The situation in Europe is different. Moving to the United States
and teaching at a university has impressed me with the degree to which
what Liu calls knowledge work, but let’s just call it culture, has changed
and is continuing to change at a furious pace. Young intellectuals, young
knowledge workers—and there could be an argument for saying that this
means all younger people (and there could be an argument for saying that
this means everyone, as “youth” destroys the possibility of “age”)—read
and write differently now. I use those verbs advisedly. In so far as they are
outmoded, they are all the more indicative of how culture is changing. If,
that is, we read these words—“read” and “write”—as our chief methods of
culture.
At this point it is still true, I believe, that “read” and “write” and
whatever it is that we create or interpret which bears some relation to “the
literary,” despite the fact that it will in almost every case be mediated by
a programmaton (computer), is still created and interpreted “with a view
to the final printing on paper, whether or not this takes place.”28 And in
so far as art and music, for example, require articulated interpretation in
some form, this statement also applies to all cultural production, including
everything not otherwise embraced by “the literary.” The deep attachment to
writing on paper—to a grammatology which has inhabited a long persistent
material cultural world—has already definitely passed over to writing “with
a view” to paper, and this is a major reconfiguration (one, for example, that
is transforming the mediation of academic authority). However, as others
have pointed out, the book and its tropes are easily represented, easily
remediated, within the culture to come, and books and paper will survive
as physical objects, material supports, for at least a generation or two. The
book will end with precisely the ambiguity that Derrida anticipated: it will
close and it will achieve its apotheosis.
I am more concerned with the way in which this literal, this literary
achievement impacts on questions of subjectivity, privacy, the unconscious,
and interiority. As critics and theorists, including Derrida, have pointed
out, there are strong links between what is articulable in relation to these
questions and language, and between language and its culturally privileged
material supports—currently still, we claim: a view to books and paper.
It is of course less clear where we locate any possible engine of cultural
change: does embodied language determine subjectivity or does en-worlded
subjectivity determine the culture of embodied language? Moreover, if we
now entertain the notion of other-intelligence/subjectivities emerging in
among posthuman cyborg cognizers, might these become a distinct motor
of change, as Hayles would be likely to argue?
To this last question, I believe that we are now required to answer in the
affirmative. Larsen’s twittering may be cool; it might be dismissed as too
cool for academic critique, but taken together with other manifest cultural
reconfigurations, it can also be seen as highly indicative. It is integral with
and a window onto the massively—popular and creatively—destructive
worlds of social networking. There, or rather, here, we no longer project
Sherry Turkle–style psychosocially transformative avatars; these networked,
programmatically mediated social networks “R US”—they are making us
what we are. Ultimately, they are transparent; at most they can be only what
Derrida calls “a secret with no mystery.”29
I slipped the adjective “destructive” into the phrase “massively …

destructive worlds of social networking.” This was a reference to Liu’s
“destructive creativity” and also an acrostic, rhetorical allusion to my title.
Destructive of what? The literary sensibilities of the person addressing you
now are corrosively challenged by social networking’s inscriptions of private
thought and feeling, by inscriptions of what I would normally consider to
be reserved for interiority. Larsen’s Twitter piece takes this on and his title
makes this clear, Whose Life Is It Anyway? Whereas I cannot divorce my
sense of interiority—you cannot know my thoughts and neither of us can
know my unconscious (although, admittedly [and recursive-unknowingly]
you may be my unconscious)—from the embodied language of a lingering
persistent culture—you and I can only write books of poetry that record
whatever can be articulated of what we feel and know is inside us—ever
younger minds may have machinic familiars and mediators who will help
them to remove any mystery from their secrets. When that happens, the
“electronic” will be long dead and literature will die.
11
Terms of Reference & Vectoralist
Transgressions: Situating Certain
Literary Transactions over
Networked Services
These are my terms of reference. I will attempt to discuss the network

in terms of certain contemporary practices of writing. Writing is here
understood as what arises following upon the inscription of language such
that—at an arbitrary subsequent moment of time—it may be read. Writing
is language that has, as a minimum, been read by its writer, but further
reading has ceased to be dependent on subsequent linguistic performance
by the writer. The physical material and media associated with writing—
typically perceptible to human readers in the form of graphic arrangements
on a notionally two-dimensional surface—is not to be identified with
any “materiality of writing” in the sense of an ontology of writing itself.
Writing only exists as it is read; or as function of its virtual, potential, and
intermittent readability; or as function of memory, which is simply a special
type of transcription within human readers.
It is important for me to set out the terms of reference above because
I will also discuss practices of writing over the network as we are coming
to understand it. I will assume that I should not, prejudicially, define the
network as one of my terms of reference because, precisely, the understanding
of network is emergent in our present situation—historically and literally.
I will nonetheless briefly develop network as a term of reference since it
appears now to be the most widely used, and increasingly predominant
surface for the inscription of writing. I refer to the network as a “surface”
in relation to writing in order to reiterate the special requirement of human
readability that writing retains in order to exist as writing. Writing is
multiply embodied within the media systems associated with the network—
devices for encoding, computation, and display; protocols for storage and
transmission—but this is simply an aspect of the processes of inscription. To
be writing, it must be able to come to a surface, on a network terminal, as
terms of reference for human readers.
I will pretend to be definite about the network. The network under
discussion is the internet. This particular network has a remarkable history
that is much studied. Within my terms of reference, I will highlight one or
two properties of the internet. It was deliberately developed as a distributed
system, having no need of a central mechanism for control, surveillance,
or policing at either the point of access or to ensure network continuity
and maintenance. Relatively straightforward protocols still allow arbitrary
devices to join and leave the network at will. When a device joins the
network, it may do so as a peer: it may have (or be associated with) an
address on the network that is, in a number of significant senses, the equal
of every other such address on the network. In the West at least, the human
user or reader is not required to engage in explicit contractual or state-
implicated administrative procedures in order to connect a device to the
network. I am deliberately simplifying a complex situation, but here my
point is to stress our sense of an underlying correspondence of relations. On
the network, functioning like an open commons, the relationship between
a terminal and the network has been constructed so as to correspond with
the relationship between an individual human writer and reader, and a
kind of pre-institutional, neo-Romantic world of reading and writing that
we associate with Western liberalism.1 I would argue, further, that this
correspondence evokes the configurations of affect associated with the latter
relation and reinforces a sensible belief that connections on the network are
commensurable with a certain widely approved, predominant sociopolitical
understanding of self and society.
Overall, as a function of massively popular consensus, the effect of this
correspondence is that we feel good about the network, and perhaps—
perhaps too often—we think good about it. We give in to it. We have
certainly, on a massive scale, given into it. We have given into it to the extent
that it now stores and gives access to what is rapidly becoming the world
of reading and writing. We undertook this work of transcription ourselves
because it seemed good to us. Now a collective commons of peer devices on
the network appears to accept, to hold, and so stand ready and able to give
back for us to read so much of all that we have written into it, especially
since the mid-1990s. Indeed, so much has been inscribed into the network
that new services have been developed, especially services of search, helping
us to find our way through all this writing and get back to reading, of a kind.
So far so good, in a sense. The story is familiar to almost all of us.
In recent years, network triumphalism has come to focus on the benefits
and affordances of “big data.” The ability to store, digitally, and analyze,
algorithmically, overwhelming quantities of data has rendered it “big” in
TERMS OF REFERENCE & VECTORALIST TRANSGRESSIONS 167
combination with the near-ubiquity of portable and mobile devices, fully

networked and capable of collecting, transmitting, and aggregating both
data and meta-data gathered from an ever-increasing proportion of human
movements, actions, and transactional, communicative exchanges—from
the highly significant and valuable (finance, trade, marketing, politics, etc.)
to the everyday and commonplace (socializing, shopping, fooling around,
etc.). Personal analysis of all but a minuscule part of this data would be
humanly impossible and so, at the cost of commensurate, individual human
attention, algorithmic agencies promise to predict trends and visualize
patterns from what has been collected with unprecedented statistical
accuracy and previously inconceivable power. The question of what this data
represents—what exactly it gives us of the world—remains little-examined.
The cost of collection is so low; the methods of collection are now incidental
and habitual, while the tangentially related profits—derived chiefly from
the reconfiguration of advertising—are massive, and far from exhausted.2 If
corporations remain somewhat uncertain as to what their data represents,
they no longer have any doubt as to its value, to the extent that the more
powerful corporate players are fixated by the production of enclosures for
the data they collect, by software architectures that are closed in the sense
that logged-in transactions take place “safely” and in a regulated manner
within corporate domains. Human users move in and out of these domains
and begin to perceive them as the global architecture and constructed
geography of a (new) world where they also dwell. In the current historical
moment, while data remains big as a function of its cultural and commercial
promotion, I propose to characterize those corporations capable of building
and enclosing domains or clouds of data as “Big Software.”3
In the political philosophy of McKenzie Wark, the enclosure of big data
by Big Software produces the specter of a new and newly exploitative phase
in social, economic, and political history. In A Hacker Manifesto, Wark
proposes the existence of a new exploitative class: the owners and controllers
of the vectors of cultural and commercial attention that proliferate in an
age of digitally mediated information.4 This “vectoralist” class acquires and
exploits the labor of a “hacker” class, which creates but does necessarily
commercially exploit those algorithms that collect and manage what we
now think of as big data. Whatever one may think of Wark’s witty and
provocative post-Marxian contextualization for his suggestive and important
ideas, there is no doubt that they give us vital purchase on the analysis and
understanding of momentous and transformational historical forces.
The emergence and development of internet services and the implicated
vectoralist enclosure of the network by Big Software is crucial here, crucial
for a critique of the network that has economic, political, and psychosocial
ramifications. This critique is well under way, and its effective elaboration
is, of course, far beyond my present scope.5 In conclusion, I will return to
a more specialist discussion of language use, of writing and reading within
the network of Big Software’s enclosing vectors. Before doing so we must

remark the extraordinary fact, so I believe, that significant sociopolitical
tendencies of the network can be detected and identified by reflecting on
only three institutions, two of which are now also powerful and influential
corporations: Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia.6
Google led the way among the pioneers of Big Software. Its ascension
to vectoralist superpower may well have been unwitting but is nonetheless
determinative. Only software that is sited on and definitive of the network
will figure as what I am here calling “Big Software.” After producing software
for terminals or for off-network corporate computing, the software giants
of a previous era acquired conventional intellectual property in order to
diversify their investments. They acquired what was already considered
investable property. By contrast, the pioneers of the new world, of the
network, merely gathered and enclosed the data that we human writers
offered up to them from the commons of language, as, fundamentally—at
least for the time being—writing. Contemporary Big Software vectoralizes
linguistic data, harvested from the commons of language, using proprietary
indexes and other big data processing techniques. Google pioneered these
processes with its infamous page-rank algorithm, once it became allied with
the Google AdWords services.7
Wikipedia is the odd one out.8 Although the existence of Wikipedia is
difficult to imagine without the synergies provided by other networked
services and affordances such as those of Google, here we see that there has
been no enclosure, no implicit non-mutual reconfiguration of terms. Rather,
terms of reference are still negotiated by peer terminals or by newly created
institutions of editorship. Any reconfiguration of terms is still a function of
compositional strategies within the purview of readers, working, at least
notionally, from the site of a terminal, as so-called “end users.” Within
Wikipedia the data that has been offered up from the commons is still
in the commons and on the surface of inscription: readable. It is writing.
Processing of terms within Wikipedia is a matter of more or less traditional
editorial practices negotiated by peer terminals that configure themselves
into contestable hierarchies of authority. Arguably, the attributed, time-
stamped editorial event on a platform such as Wikipedia is the model for the
future of scholarly knowledge building and dissemination, lacking only the
active and sympathetic engagement of ultimately commensurate institutions
such as universities and publishing houses.9
In the case of Facebook, we see that the process of enclosure becomes
perceptible, established, normalized. What was freely offered up to the
network by any peer terminal is now taken into Facebook. The simple
homepage is no more. It is inside some other service, predominantly
Facebook itself. At the point of being taken in, whenever a peer terminal
uses Facebook, terms are agreed and the terminal ceases to be a peer, as it
implicitly ratifies Facebook’s terms of service. Indeed, this model vectoralist
corporation has actually chosen to recast its terms of use as a domain-

defining “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.”10 For some time now,
Google has been realigning its vectoral strategies in order, evermore, to bring
the human terminal within itself, lest, instead, terminal readers use their
services from within Facebook, or remain entirely without, as unregulated
terminal peers. Google’s provision of Gmail, requiring accounts and stable
linked terminal identities, was a major turning point in a process that now
drives Google+ and demonstrates that vectoralist predominance depends on
bringing terms and terminals within an enclosure where as many as possible
human readers and writers exchange their terms on terms that allow these
once human terms to be harvested for the accumulation of big data.11
It would require independent corporate-historical investigative scholarship
to propose and document the historical moment when there was a fundamental
change in Google’s understanding of its business, its self-reflexive grasp of
vectoralism. Nonetheless, the introduction of Gmail was remarkable and is
datable. I would speculate that, shortly before the introduction of Gmail,
Google realized that its famous search box was not a portal but a mouth. It
understood that the collection and analysis of all the search terms continually
being supplied to it by human writers was far more valuable than any indexes
it had generated from what had already been inscribed on the surface of the
network. By definition and protocol the surface of the network is open to
and, in principle, independently indexable by any terminal peer. Thus, we still
think of Google as a gift. We could have worked to build our own indexes
and we may still do so, but, as it happens, a Good Search has been provided
for us. The True Search has been Freely Given. Or so we say to ourselves. Any
other terminal peer might have done the same; the trick was simply to have
discovered the one true search at the historical moment just before Moore’s
law made it feasible for a terminal peer to do the same on any scale. The free
service worked. It was and is used by all-but-every terminal on the network.
Google as the zero-degree of the portal—transparent, self-effacing access
to some other writing on the network that a human user wishes to read—
was precisely that: nothing. For now we see that Google is entirely focused
and founded on everything that we feed into its mouth, everything that is
proper to us as desiring humans, or, more precisely, proper to the network-
authorized agencies of human and posthuman desire.12 Google must find a
way to keep an overwhelming and representative majority of such entities
feeding it with data or, better yet—learning from Facebook, its vectoralist
peer—a way to take into itself, as Google+, every property and method of
symbolic human self-representation on the network. As of the present day,
a vast majority of human terminals on the network willingly and frequently
write into one particular space, the maw of Google. At the very moment
of doing so and by dint of this action we agree to terms of service, terms
that establish a hierarchical, non-mutual, non-reciprocal relationship and we
allow the abduction of our terms of reference.13
The act of making of the agreement by such means is likely to be asserted

as an initial article of the terms themselves. Contracts are often agreed more
or less implicitly—by the shaking of hands, after a loose verbal exchange,
and so on—and, as such, they may nonetheless be recognized in custom
and in law. In the case of Terms of Use or Terms of Service, the contract is
most often explicit from the point of view of the provider, while the human
terminal is likely to remain unaware of the agreed terms in any detail.
It is interesting to consider that the textual, documentary articulation
of such agreements has really only come into its own as an aspect of day-
to-day life since the advent of Big Software.14 Once software has been
manufactured on such a scale as to provide a service to many human users,
there may no longer be a person involved with the service who is available
to articulate terms, nor any associated physical products or objects. Even
today, when we buy a book, by contrast, we may do so from a person able
to describe its facilities. In any case, we do not expect to be agreeing to terms
of its use, set out in detail by a publisher or retailer, nor to think of the book
as, itself, providing a service. A book’s terms of use are adequately specified
by the conditions of its production and distribution, and subsequently by its
physical properties, which are immediately accessible to us.
However, when we read or write with a computer, we are often in the
position of using the services of remote software applications that we do not
own or license. Merely by doing so, we will have agreed to terms of use. This
clearly implies some regulation of any medium of exchange that the service
requires, most commonly, digitally encoded language itself. Our reading and
writing comes to be, literally, mediated on terms.
Language is a commons, and yet by contrast

With first nature’s free resources, it is constitutive
Of culture while all at once incorporate within
Those cultures it enables. As language is a commons,
To use it, we need not agree to terms.
Now, counter to our expectations and our rights,
Agreements as to terms of language use
Are daily ratified by the vast majority
Of so-called users—you-and-I—by all of us
Who make and share our language on the Internet.
This situation had long been in place before the provision and effective
promotion of network-based “cloud” computing. Now Big Software runs
from the “cloud.” It invites us to the cloud, offering services associated with
our provision of data. Terms of use regulate this mediation of our data
and—often “by default”—the same terms may cause us to agree that our
data will be mined and manipulated, albeit anonymously, as we move it into
the “cloud.” Both the tools we use to read and write and the material traces
of our textual practice come to be stored on systems that are removed from
us as readers and writers. We are increasingly dependent on self-regulating,
proprietary services without which we cannot gain access to our reading
or our writing, and whenever we do gain access, we do so on terms. These
circumstances have momentous consequences for textual practice, and their
careful consideration is crucial.
As a phrase of current English, “terms of use” associates, like “terms of
reference,” with the “terms” of “search terms,” “key terms,” crowd-sourcing
“terms” or “tags,” the “terms” of an argument or discourse, and with our
“use” of these and all others terms as an aspect of “language use”—the
“usages” of all linguistic interlocution. Language is a commons, and yet, in
contrast to the commons of the world’s natural resources, it is a commons
that is directly constitutive of culture while at the same time incorporated
“within” any culture it enables. This is demonstrable in that there are only
enculturated languages (plural), and thus, in each instance, a particular
language is one of a plurality of commons that welcomes any user of its
specific, located resources. As a commons—radically co-constitutive of the
cultures within which we dwell—in order to use a language, we do not
expect to agree to terms. Rather, languages set out the terms of reference for
culture itself, the only articulable terms it knows. This makes it all the more
important, in an era during which the “digital (mediation of) textuality”
comes to predominate, that we take full account of any implicit agreements
as to terms of language use where these are being reiteratively ratified by a
vast and growing population of highly influential language users.
We cannot proceed without continuing to refer to the most obvious
example of Big Software that is currently used by hundreds of millions of
people, all of whom have thus agreed to terms. Google sets out terms of
service that regulate the significant aspects of textual practice in which it
specializes.15 This one company processes more text, more linguistic material,
than any other computational service on the planet. The particular service—
page-ranked indexed searching—that established Google as a commercial
and culture powerhouse is founded on textual analysis of web pages and
their tagged links.
Services, like those of Google and many others such

Still expressly offer their results in swift symbolical
Response to phrases of a language we call natural:
Words composed by human writers, desirous
To discover something that they wish to read,
If only with the aim of transacting through commerce,
And so satisfying a moiety of our more venal cravings.16
Google’s and most other related services are still explicitly designed to be
responsive to phrases or clauses of natural language composed by human
writers who wish to find something to read, even if only with the goal
of undertaking a commercial transaction or satisfying a desire. Intimately
linked to this service provision is the question of how these and now many
other interconnected services relate to the vital institutions of literary
culture, in at least two ways: at a collective level through their effects on
(not an exhaustive list) publishers, libraries, and universities; and at an
individual or collaborative level through their effects on literary aesthetic
practice.
Although the objects of our culture have each

Their specific materials, now these may be mediated
By the insubstantial substance of machines
That symbolize—or seem to, in potential—
Every thing. The digital appears
To us historically unprecedented, thus:
It presents itself as servant and as Golem,
Non-vital but commensurate, un-alive
And yet all-capable: of service, of facility:
A limitless archive of affordances,
And so it ceases to be some thing or substance
Amongst others; it becomes the currency
Of all we are: essential infrastructure,
Determinative of practice and of thought.
Despite this, it still seems made by us, and lesser,
A servant still, and so we treat the digital
As if it remained in service, though it sustains—
Or seems to—all that we desire to be.
We will not live without it, yet we believe
That we still choose to purchase and to use
A relation that is optional, elective, and we
Manage it as such.
One of the ways in which digital mediation appears to be historically

unprecedented is that it offers itself as a service or facility or catalog of
affordances (such as word processing for writing), but it quickly goes on
to establish itself as essential infrastructure. Thus, it becomes remarkably
determinative of practice and ideological framework while nonetheless
continuing to be managed and developed as if it remained a service. It
also presents itself as a low- or no-cost commercially viable service, and
therefore, in a number of senses, it seems to be optional or elective. This
same syndrome plays out in the relationship between, for example, a
university’s management of its “computing services” on the one hand and
its intellectual mission on the other. Before an institution like a university
fully realizes and internalizes (administratively) the fact that practices
demanding digital infrastructure will be constitutive of its academic mission,

its computing services are willingly swallowed up by more “cost-effective”
and more innovative services provided from outside the institution. These,
as infrastructure, may then go on (in a more or less subtle manner) to
reconstitute and reform the institution.17
“Electronic” and/or “digital” literature, along with “digital,” “new
media” and “net” or “network” art, pioneered new practices outside those
paradigms of cultural production that are challenged by such infrastructural
developments, but digital cultural practice is not, by that token, necessarily
in harmony with the interests of new, as-yet-unconstituted cultural services.
It seems to be only recently—since the middle of the first decade of the
twenty-first century—that sharp contradictions have become clear: between
a putative new media as service provision and the Big Software realpolitik
of new media as fundamentally constitutive of cultural and critical practice:
determinative not only of potential but of possibility.
On the one hand, Big Software has begun to shape a world that has its
own architecture and momentum, on a scale that ceases to be perturbable
by individual or independent collective action. Big Software carves out real
estate in the world of the network in the same way that fences established the
earlier enclosures of other commons.18 The “land” being enclosed is human
attention, and the chief symbolic vector of this attention is language use.
On the other hand, this same Big Software is dedicated to channeling and
storing the chiefly linguistic flows of potentially transactive data through
its new architecture. At the initial and any subsequent moment of use, the
tacit performative language set out in terms of service transforms what the
user offers as data into capta—captured and abducted data—that may, as
granted in the terms, be used by the service for entirely other purposes than
those for which it was supplied.19 For example, a user may search for words
with which to read and write, but the words of the search will be taken and
correlated with other searches and language data in order to reduce the
friction of future searches, and more specifically to reduce the friction of
searches that will bring the most revenue to what is, after all, a commercial
service. Any reader and writer’s cultural—Arts and Humanities—use of
networked services will be, at best, misaligned with these services’ use of a
reader and writer’s data, but then, the reader and writer do not, typically,
set out terms of use for that portion of their data that they offer up to capta.
We see that the question of how, that is, on what terms, such services
relate to literary culture very much applies to the individual practitioner, to
collaborative project–based groups, to any writer writing to be read.
Even for those writers

Who may be in denial of any digital mediation
Of their practice, networked services are likely
To provide for them: crucial points of reference,
Essential to the composition of their texts,

And intimate with whatever artistry they own.
If this is the case, then, given how the structures
Of the network and its services are deployed:
Terms of use have, literally, been agreed.
The commons of language is, in part, enclosed
by its very makers. The writer has conceded
That he or she is happy to supply a phrase—
How many? And to whom? And on what terms?—
And then to receive, to read, and to transact
With results that have been fashioned from the store
Of every other user’s phrases, and from the indexed
Language of all that you-and-I have published
On the Internet since it began.
The published internet and associated textual intercommunication

amounts to one source for the corpora of Big Software services. If we
consider the freely searchable Google Books corpus, we discover an
equally extraordinary situation relating to a traditionally privileged
cultural domain: the world of letters, the world of print culture. Google
acquired access to as many books and journals as possible and digitized
them without secure knowledge concerning what they could or could
not do with the scanned texts. Apart from any directly profitable use
Google may or may not have projected for the digitized books—by way,
for example, of the publication or sale of copyright-orphaned and out-of-
copyright material—there is the simple fact that one company has now,
in a sense, taken into itself some major part of everything that has so far
been written. A single network service now holds this material, although,
because of existing copyright law and other agreements, it may be
prohibited from representing this information in the original form that it
was given—as complete books, or articles, and so on. Authors, publishers,
and libraries have, for the moment, successfully resisted the handing-over
of certain rights relating to the distribution or sale of integral works within
this vast database,20 but this overlooks the fact that Google nonetheless
possesses the data, makes it accessible to its own internal processes, and,
when users search this corpus, serves results back to contemporary readers
and writers, in new forms of processed capta, and under explicit terms
of service. Although we may be amazed, if not dazzled, by the analytic
power that these results can provide in some contexts—integrated with or
in parallel to those of the now-familiar internet search—as users of these
services we might ask, on what terms was this data supplied, and whose
data was it in the first place? Does any such service have an innate right to
use this data in the way that it is manifestly being used? How is it being
used? How can we find out?
“Results that have been fashioned,” which is to say

That they, words orthothetically abject
To those within our selves, have been shaped
By algorithm: and to this circumstance the writer
Has agreed.21 Perhaps we may, you or I, pretend
To have some general understanding of these algorithms’
Behaviors, yet the detailed workings of such processes
Are jealously protected. Indeed, they are proprietary,
Closely guarded and esteemed as highly valuable
For reasons that may be entirely divorced from
Or at odds with the tenor of our queries.
The underlying transactions and the relationships
Devolved are very different from any that arise
When you or I take down our dictionary to look up
A word.
As writers and readers, we are forced to consider that our relationship with
language and literature will never be the same. If the medium of literary art
has significantly migrated to the network, where it is gathered, channeled,
and filtered by Big Software on a massive scale, daily touching the linguistic
lives of huge populations, then new practices for reading and writing with
and against such services must surely arise and go beyond any uses that are
constrained by the terms of service or use now made unilaterally explicit by
contemporary service providers.
However the power of the cultural vector

Represented by the mouth or maw of Google’s
Search box and its ilk is all unprecedented.
For any artist-scientist of language, it is like
The revolutionary and revelatory power
Of a newly discovered optic, allowing you-and-I
To see, suddenly and spectacularly, farther
Into the universe of language by several
Orders of magnitude. The writer may observe
And get some sense of the frequency or range
Of usages for words and phrases in our living,
Contemporary tongues, up to the millisecond—
All in a few keystrokes and clicks. This extraordinary
Facility—inconceivable until just now—is presented
As a freely open service, in the guise of what
Has already been cited as “cultural vector.”
Oriented
Where? And how? By whom? For whom? To what
End?
It is only necessary to cite this one apparent by-product of search—one of

many—to get some sense of the awesome cultural and, here, linguistic power
that appears to be offered to us users by key service providers. In the domain
of the literary, working writers now habitually make reference to search
engine indexes, and discover contexts for the language they compose in a
manner and to an extent that they could never previously have imagined. It
is, I would venture, a facility that gives us habitual access to no less than an
instance of the literary sublime: an encounter with overwhelming quantities
of language, arguably beautiful, that is, through the search terms we type,
manifestly and directly linked with words of our own: a literary sublime,
touching what we write as we write it.22 Nonetheless, we must recall that this
kind of cultural power is founded on the algorithmic processing, analysis,
and indexing of what was and is published on the network as data by human
writers. It may have been given as true data but it is then processed and
analyzed as capta.23 In the case of the language that was posted to web
pages and then indexed as such, at the time of the event of inscription or
publication, onto the surface of the network, those human writers involved
were not necessarily or in principle using the services of contemporary Big
Software.24 Natural language data was and is given over to the network
and then it was and is harvested by increasingly powerful and sophisticated
algorithmic processes, and these processes themselves were not and are not,
generally speaking, subjected to “terms of use” in relation to the specific
substance of what they harvest, predominantly still, to date, language. Most
human writers, posting to the web, do not specify terms of use for search
engine robots or their corporate instigators. Thus, when these writers come to
interrogate the processed and indexed capta that has been culled and sorted
from their linguistic commons, human writers’ acquiescence to network
providers’ terms of service constitutes a non-mutual non-reciprocal relation
or, at the very least, a relation that forecloses the possibility of productive
mutuality with fairly regulated, well-understood institutional commitments.
And yet surely, given the previously all-but-inconceivable, if obvious,
benefits that services like search provide, surely, in the circumstances, it must
be worth it for human writers and readers to continue to agree to terms. I
do not think that it is.
Even were we to concede that the circumstances of Big Software,
big data, and the cloud demand important, irreversible changes in the
relationships between individuals and their institutions, and that certain of
these changes were clearly of significant value for all stakeholders, there
remains the simple fact that we have not sufficiently examined and drawn
out the implications—for ourselves as individuals but also and perhaps even
more importantly for the institutions that constitute our socioeconomic and
political relations—of the specific terms to which we agree when we offer up
our self- and institutional-representations-as-“data” (that is, capta) within
the vectoralist enclosures of Big Software.
That this momentous shift in no less

Than the spacetime of linguistic culture
Should be radically skewed by terms of use
Should remind us that it is, fundamentally,
Motivated and driven by quite distinct concerns
To those of art. Here are vectors of utility and greed.
The reconfiguration and reform of institutional relations with Big Software’s

network services, with vectoralist interests, those founded on the aggregation
of so-called “big data”—this is one of the most important socioeconomic and
political tasks facing all of us now. I make this statement as a practitioner
and theorist of writing, and this chapter is a specific call for writers to take
a self-consciously expert, forward-looking, and responsible role in what will
be a necessary struggle, since, for the immediate time-being, the formations
that I am critiquing as non-mutual and non-reciprocal are manufactured
from language, the very medium of the writer.25
I have just stated the tenor of my chapter. In lieu of a conclusion, I set out a
number of instances that I characterize in terms of vectoralist transgressions,
thresholds we have already crossed but that might well still give us pause,
and cause us to consider ways in which we should undertake a profound
renegotiation of terms with vectoralist agencies.
Whenever we transact with networked services a significant number of
events occur for which the question of transgression is crucially at issue.
A transgression is a crossing over and beyond; more specifically, over and
beyond the thresholds of social conventions, the conventions of institutionally
sited practices. As we transact with language using networked services, our
words move across many thresholds and in so far as our words represent and
embody our identities, our subjectivities, our subject positions, they move
us back and forth over these thresholds. We may bracket or suspend the
negative connotation of transgression or may even, in a spirit of subversive
reform, affirm transgression as value per se. Judgments of cultural value and
positive or negative effects on ourselves and our institutions are suspended
in the following anecdotal narration. The remarkable thing to me, as I set
them out, is the extent to which so many of these transgressions are ill- or
unconsidered by human agencies. They seem to be “merely” the “inevitable”
consequence of manifold technological processes, network enabled.26
The first transgression is the transcription of language into the digital
as such. We send language over a threshold into the digital by typing into
a computer via, typically now, a word processor. The structure of linguistic
representation or transcription is, if not identical with, then absolutely
amenable to digital forms of representation as fundamental abstractions of
the symbolic. This fact of linguistic abstraction is an essential part of how
language is, although it does not follow that human language is reducible
to any of its essential (and necessarily multilingual) forms of representation.
Through print and typewriting, peoples of alphabetic systems of inscription

have long been used to representing language in terms of the discrete
symbolic abstractions that we know as letters.27 The difference of word
processing is that, as we type, the letters and words and larger units of
language cross over and become immediately accessible to the realm of data,
or more properly of capta, of whatever is considered linguistic data by the
predominant technological regime. Our words transgress into capta, and
they persuade us to transgress there also. We do this without thinking of it,
and all the while it changes our relationship with language fundamentally,
as we have seen.
The word processor is running on a computer, and our letters and words
have now transgressed, crossed over, and gone beyond previous conventions
of writing, to be “within” the computer and its associated systems of storage.
Meanwhile the Google Books project has been word processing for us by
scanning every book possible and so bringing all of what was previously in
a largely unindexed realm of reading and writing “within” the same regime
of capta where anything we have word processed already dwells. This is
another transgression, bringing all that has been written over a conventional
threshold into the world of “big data.” Again, we consider this unthinkingly
as good, as an aspect of corporations such as Google “not being evil,” of
their mission to “make [the world’s information] universally accessible and
useful.”28 In terms of the conventions of copyright (based on eighteenth-
century conceptions of intellectual property, modeled on real estate as much
as anything), we are sensitive to transgressions that might be consequent on
Google’s acquisition-by-scanning of all the writing that has been published,
but we have not worried over the transgression of digitization itself. We have
not considered the consequences of having all that was not indexed, suddenly
subject not only to index but to many other analytical algorithms. If, for
reasons to do with copyright and the interests of copyright holders, Google
is not able to make all of what it has scanned universally available to us
human readers (either freely or for a fee), we do not question Google’s right
to have scanned this cultural material and to make whatever use of it it
wishes “privately,” “within” the corporation29 (see note 20). Surely, there is a
vast amount of culturally and commercially valuable information that could
be mined from all that capta, and this is something Google is apparently free
to do for itself, while we, meanwhile, may only get access to some small part
of this material on terms, terms likely to be determined by the capta holder.
Suddenly, I feel transgressed against, as well as taken beyond a threshold.
I was once a reader who visited libraries. Now I become aware that every
book and all that has been written are both closer to me than they have ever
been before but also differently, if no less accessible. I know it is there on the
network, at my fingertips, but I can’t be sure of getting to it without agreeing
to terms and establishing my (network) credentials. On the other hand,
across some, to me, impassable threshold, I know that Google has it all.
As I am word processing—always already transgressing many former

conventions of reading and writing—I cut and paste some of the words proper
to my writing back and forth from word processor to browser. Initially,
perhaps, I am pasting them into the mouth of a search box, using these
words from my writing to find something with which they are associated
in the indexes beyond the threshold of the all-consuming, consumer-driven
maw. Or I may want to acquire some sense of how other writers have
used these same words of mine, of yours and mine, in other contexts. So
many transgressions in a single simple action! I have carried my words to
a threshold and launched them over it into a far-distant database where
they will be collected and time-stamped and geolocalized and associated
with whatever other “anonymized” traces of human interaction that my
computer has encoded and made accessible to the processes and algorithms
of the search provider. The search box and its “page” are in no way passive.
As soon as they detect the “presence” of my language, they react and send
me back words and images that are intimately, orthothetically associated
with mine. These words and images of words occupy and then transgress my
attention with the explicit intention of influencing my future action. I seem
to accept all this unthinkingly and it is proposed to me as either “useful” or
neutral. I am not in a position to set out human-interpretable terms for my
subsequent interaction with the processes of the page but merely by having
pasted letters and words into the search box maw, I have explicitly agreed to
terms and from this point on any action I take that ventures beyond certain
thresholds set out in those terms will be explicitly deemed a transgression
by whoever inscribed these terms of use. Even if I remain unsure of what is
and is not a transgression, the network service provider and its algorithmic
agents will be quite clear, and they will act on their judgments immediately
and automatically.
One of the most interesting and profoundly contradictory thresholds
for transgression, established by terms of use, is that between robotic or
algorithmic processes and those initiated and carried out by humans. The
feeding mouths of networked service providers desire human capta and
logged-in, signed-up “captive” human participants. They want to know
what humans want for the simple reason that they want to please humans.
Humans still, currently, control the processes of commercial exchange. It is,
ultimately, humans who are to be persuaded to buy things in response to
appropriate advertisement. Networked providers are currently repaid for
their services in a proportion correlative with human readers’ responses to
advertising.
If language is a commons then what appears

To be a gateway or a portal to our language
Is, in truth, an enclosure, the outward sign
Of a non-reciprocal, hierarchical relation.
The vectoralist providers of what we call services

Harvest freely from our searches in themselves,
And from whatever language we have published,
Using fantastically powerful and sophisticated
Algorithmic process, lately known by many names,
As bots, robots, spiders and the like, but we users—
You-and-I, who make and publish all we write—
Are explicitly denied, according to their terms of use,
Any such reciprocal opportunity. We may not freely
Use our own algorithmic processes to probe
The universe of capta—our captured and abducted data—
Even though our aim may be to imitate,
Assist or to prosthetically—aesthetically—enhance:
To beautify the human user.
Thus, ideally, no robots should access these networked services. Many

problematic contradictions arise here. What the terms of service mean is that
no bad robots need access these services. But who decides what is or is not a
robot and whether it is bad? Every computer linked to the net is, as it links,
a robot. It is a robot made for linking to the net. This is manifestly good.
Our computers are good robots or at least they are neutral, transparent
representatives of their humans to the network. The browser is a robot that
is run by the same computer that is running the robot connected to the net.
The browser is clearly a good robot that understands a number of good
protocols that build good channels for human desire. But a browser could
easily be turned bad, with a little malevolent programming, for example,
to do random, non-human searches by itself.30 The browser might become
a bad robot, a transgressor, disregarding terms of use or even, indeed, the
law. Say all the robots I’m running are good: good network connection,
good browser. What if I, a human, type too many mad, bad, or aesthetic
searches into my browser’s search box a little bit too fast and a little bit too
regularly. Google’s (good) robots will ask me if I’m human simply because
I’m behaving like a “robot.” I may have to solve a captcha to prove to a
good robot that I am human, albeit a slightly bad human who has been,
clearly, acting like a bad robot. What if I, a good human, write (that is create
or compose) a program that acts like a bad robot for good reasons, for
aesthetic, culturally critical reasons, or simply to recapture and reclaim some
of that superb big data that lies on the other side of the mouth-threshold
where the powerful indexes dwell? Well, if I do that, it’s pretty bad, and
it’s against most terms of use. Big Software can, it seems—via innovation,
hyperhistorical momentum, and force majeure—deploy whatever robots
it wishes—to index the web pages that humans have written or to police
human access to its services—and Big Software will deem these robots
“good” without need of justification or regulation. But any robot that you or
I build and that interacts with these services is “bad” by default, guilty until
proven innocent, normally without any reasonable opportunity to prove
itself one way or the other. In these extraordinary circumstances, there are
undoubtedly multiple transgressions of processes and actions in relation to
whatever threshold we maintain between the human and the algorithmic, the
non- or post-human. Our institutional management and understanding of
this threshold is undertaken by forces that are neither mutual nor reciprocal.
The de facto control exercised over these relations by corporations such as
Google and Facebook is very much under-examined. However, one thing is
made clear to us: we should not behave like non-humans, and perhaps not
even like unusual humans with unusual interests.
And so, why not?

The foremost reason is: the harvested capta
Might be muddied and so rendered less effectively
Correlate with its primary purpose: to represent
In a normalized form, the most frequently expressed
And potentially most profitable human desires,
Such that advertisement may be intimately associated
With our harvested phrases, ideally, all at the moment
Of harvesting itself, with human eyes to read
Not only a desired result but an intimately associated
And immediately transactable new desire. Moreover,
the vectoralist ads are made with sign chains that are
Orthothetically disposed towards the language
We have written. This also is previously unknown:
That advertisement intended to induce a profitable
And non-reciprocal exchange be made from some thing
That is proper to its addressee. This is material
Appropriation of cultural interiority to venal desire,
Wrongly subjecting and reforming you-and-I
Within a false enclosure of precisely that which
Should never be enclosed: the openness of all
That we inscribe. As yet, the so-called interaction
of so-called users is falsely founded on unwitting, habitual,
And ignorant terms of abuse.
In these late days, we have become involved, as humans, with a highly complex
and sophisticated system of chiefly robotic, Big Software–driven processes,
while, at the same time, being expressly constrained in the interactive use
of our own robotic or algorithmic processes. Interestingly, certain unusual
and even aesthetic processes may be substituted for those we might describe
as robotic or algorithmic, but they may nonetheless be automatically—
immediately and materially—disallowed by the undoubtedly robotic agents
of our providers’ terms of service. This highlights the fact that, despite a
rhetoric of universal access and maximized usefulness across any domain of
information, we are being coerced into using processes that are, minimally,
mimetic of normal human users, normally equipped. We are coerced into
using normalized “human” processes that will engage with those of our
network service providers in such a way as to perform transactions leading
to huge marginal profit for these providers.
Currently, this marginal profit is derived from the management of human
attention so as to direct it to advertising. This may be all very well when
the media of interaction are, substantively, contiguous with and devoted
to commercial transaction and exchange. However, network services will
enclose, monitor, and process any and all linguistic practice by their users,
everything from everyday, habitual intercommunication to “high-literary,”
“high-theoretical,” “high-critical” correspondence and production. These
services exist to process (albeit, typically, with anonymization) and vectoralize
the commons of language, the commons of symbolic interlocution. This co-
option of a vast domain of linguistic events and transactions in the service
of vectoralist redirection of cultural attention requires stronger critique
than it has so far encountered, allied with general and thorough resistance
and regulation by existing social institutions of all kinds, including those of
literary aesthetic practice.
Perhaps the most intimate, linguistically implicated transgression
enacted as a result of human interaction with network services is the
capture of words that are proper to the human writer and the manufacture
of advertisements from these very words. The words in question may have
been enveloped by a login, by their enclosure within an email message, by
their insertion into a search field.31 However, terms of service—enclosing
the “enveloping” frameworks themselves—ensure that these thresholds
are transgressible by algorithms that will extract words and phrases,
associate them with putatively desirable commodities and services and
then, incorporate them, across other framing thresholds, within the bodies
of advertising copy. This copy may then be instantly re-presented back to
the human reader who wrote the words for entirely other purposes and in
entirely other contexts.32 The abstraction of linguistic elements guarantees,
to an extent, our inability to own or hoard them as such; however our
reading and writing of sequences of words, linguistic elements, does cause
them to exist as proper to ourselves, authored. I consider this the operation
of linguistic ontology, bringing written words into being within and
belonging to the human subject (who may then, of course, abject them for
other human subjects).33 Even the catastrophically flawed legal conventions
of copyright establish strings of words as licensable “things,” belonging
to an author. So, then, taking words of mine to make advertisements is, I
argue, even more of a corporally invasive appropriation than would obtain
if an advertising algorithm captured the image of its addressee and then
cast him or her in a desirable and commercially transactable circumstance.

It is a remarkable trick of symbolic practice that this visceral, if linguistic,
appropriation—reaching into our private interiorities—goes all but
unremarked while the analogous appropriation of personal audiovisual
imagery will cause sensation and controversy as it begins to occur—when
the live-captured image of my face appears seamlessly composited into
a billboard’s advertising photography as I pass it, showing me modeling
designer clothes, sailing on holiday in the Mediterranean, or experiencing
the beneficial effects of a new palliative drug.34
But then, we have agreed to this use of our words. Would we have done
so if we had any idea of what we were and are agreeing to?
12
Reading and Giving: Voice
and Language
In an earlier chapter, I began to develop a theoretical concept, that of media-

constituted diegesis.1 I was concerned with the inscription of language in
other media, by which I mean new or unconventional support and delivery
media for language. The earlier chapter wrestled with immersive, stereo-3D
audiovisuality as a “complex surface” for linguistic inscription. Linguistic
performance is, overwhelmingly, embodied in physical media as either
articulated sound or graphical arrangements on a visible surface.2 Language
differs from other artistic media in that, although it must always be supported
by physical media, when we consider the ontology of the linguistic artifact
(which may be simultaneously proposed as an aesthetic artifact), this artifact
cannot be identified with its physical support or delivery media.3
This ontological non-identification of linguistic performances and
their media-as-material-embodiment is philosophically fundamental and
prior to any questions we might consider in relation to media-constituted
diegesis. However, because linguistic practice may also, simultaneously,
be aesthetic practice, and due to tendencies in criticism that compare and
conflate specific, quite distinct artistic practices—reducing one to another
conceptually, or considering them as structurally analogous—the singularity
of linguistic practice may become difficult to distinguish. By contrast, my
overarching concern is for an expository elaboration of the specificities
of language as a medium, particularly in the sense of artistic or aesthetic
medium. However, I will here be outlining analogous circumstances in non-
linguistic media, claiming that the human capacity to distinguish diegetic
worlds is comparable with our capacity to distinguish readable language.
I attempt to show that when we distinguish media-constituted diegesis in
non-linguistic practices, this may allow us—literally, if our examples are
taken from the domain of graphic visuality—to see how diegetic worlds
of significance and affect—as constituted by practices in their media—may
distinguish themselves from differently constituted diegetic worlds even

when they are embodied in the same work and the same physical media. A
work that we experience or read often presents us with perceptible diegetic
breaks, with distinct worlds—juxtaposed, layered, intersected—worlds
in generative collision and productive collusion. When language is in an
embodied world, there is always at least one such break.
For human subjects the notion of “world”—that which is conjured by
diegesis—embraces the symbolic: the very symbolic practice and play that
engenders narrative and poetics, that constitutes significance per se, and that
generates affect as persistent or recurrent symbolized sensation. Sketching
out an argument that I will shortly make at somewhat greater length, I
propose to show that the kind of diegetic breaks we find within certain
aesthetic works are a model for the diegetic breaks that necessarily exists,
separating all linguistic performance from any media that supply its support
and embodiment. Linguistic diegesis, the “world” that language produces,
is always an other world, distinct from any that constitutes its material
existence. One reason for this circumstance is that linguistic artifacts—their
worlds and diegeses—only exist in so far as they are subject to readability.4
The worlds of language are otherwise indistinguishable from the material
media within which they are embodied. Only when language is read(able)
can the stories and poetics of its other worlds be perceived as entities capable
of actualizing their otherwise virtual significance and affect in ours.
Taken thus far, the argument rehearses and consolidates an analysis of
language and media in order to make a point or two concerning the ontology
of linguistic performances and artifacts—their correlative dependence on
readability. However, this chapter attempts to go further. If we accept that
there are varieties of linguistic practice in digital media for which the actual
performances of virtual language in these media—the traces generated—are
the result of purely or predominantly computational processes, then what
is the ontological status of these algorithmically generated performances?
I argue that such algorithmic artifacts do not exist as constituents of
language. This chapter suggests that subsequent human performances of
computationally generated linguistic artifacts should be understood as
readings that cause virtual linguistic artifacts to exist in actuality and as
such: to exist as language. Accepting this strange, singular demand that
something physically inscribed by more or less exhaustively understood
symbolic processes nonetheless may not yet exist—as the only type of thing
it might ever become—will help us—writers generally, and digital language
artists specifically—to a better appreciation of what our medium is: what
language is. This circumstance also suggests an ethics of digital language art
practices: perform human readability, or risk having failed as maker.
Programmable computation has provided human and, perhaps,
posthuman cultures with a new and expanding domain of virtual—that
is, not yet or necessarily actualized—expression. The domain of symbolic
READING AND GIVING: VOICE AND LANGUAGE 187
practice—including logic, mathematics, and even the regularly encoded

representation of language—has always been an appreciable part of human
experience and thought. In the West, from at least the sixteenth century,
an explicit association of human thought and language with “universal”
symbolic practice has been proposed. However, it is only since the postwar
advent and proliferation of computational devices—stored-program Turing
machines, in both theory and in practical implementation—that inscriptions
of symbolic processes have entered the human archive on any scale, and have,
more importantly, been provided with the bodies and/or human-prosthetic
organs that allow these processes to be an active part of our world.
We call inscriptions of algorithmic process code. Much has been written
about the relationship between code and language—computer “languages”
and natural languages—including by myself.5 Without offering here any
extended discussion, I take the position that code is not (natural) language,
not language as such, and that practices of coding are quite distinct from
practices of language. Nonetheless, I also maintain that practices of both
code and language are practices of the symbolic, and that code shares
language’s strange but henceforth—subsequent to the proliferation of
programming and programmable devices in human cultures—less singular
relationship with materiality and embodiment.
Code may be “low” or “high” “level.” Conventionally—according to
the designers and users of computer “languages”—the higher the level of
code, the easier it is for humans to read in at least the sense of anticipating
and understanding what the code will do.6 Higher-level code, as human-
readable artifact, is simply the inscribed record of a specialist language
use (a small constituent part of the world of language). In the terms of my
present argument, it comes into being as such, as language, as a function,
precisely, of this human readability. However, when we consider the proper
ontology of code in general—its virtuality, actuality, and artifactuality—
code comes into existence, only as it is run through a computer, a Turing
machine, a programmaton (as I would far prefer to designate these devices
of ours). This is to say that the proper existence of code is a sum of the
events and the effects of a privileged symbolic inscription passing through
a computer processor: the execution of the program or programs inscribed
in the code.7 The parallelism of this delineation of code’s ontology with that
of linguistic artifactual ontology is no accident. Both language and code are
symbolic phenomena. Language is something that is readable by humans;
code is something that is executable by (currently) Turing machines. One
may be tempted to write “readable by machines” as characterizing code
ontology, but this would be a metaphoric, anthropocentric usage, disguising
and glossing over the fact that most code—especially as it runs—is far from
being either readable or executable by humans. It is not, in itself, language.
The situation is complicated by the fact that one possible outcome of
the events and effects of code may be the generation of virtual language,
the inscription of linguistic artifacts that may be offered up—typically on

screen—for potential human reading. The strong position of my current
argument is that the ontology of these linguistic artifacts is problematic.
Their proper existence is correlative to human cultural engagement and
may be subject, in particular, to human performances of reading. The virtual
language generated by code exists as language only when its readability is
experienced and affirmed by one or more humans.
One might object that a relationship with readability is already
guaranteed in the case of code-generated virtual language, because its—
presumed human—programmers have anticipated potential human reading.
This may very well be the case, but I provide two responses. First, I would
suggest that when programmers are thoroughly engaged with potential
human reading, the generated virtual language will, itself, tend to reflect
this engagement and would not, thus, require any prior knowledge of the
programmers’ active involvement with readability in order to distinguish
itself as actual, readable language. In any case—to further respond—we
are not, primarily, concerned with such edge cases: of virtual language
generated, effectively, by engaged human writers, using programming as an
aspect of their compositional medium. What we need to consider is that we
live in what is possibly a transitional era, but one in which virtual linguistic
artifacts are being generated on a massive scale, while the motivation for
these events and effects of code is far from being fully, comprehensively
representative of human culture as reflected, importantly, in its cultures of
reading and writing. Rather, the production of these artifacts is driven by
the requirement to channel human attention (to advertising) or to facilitate
transaction (predominantly commercial), and sometimes also simply for the
sake of programmatic, computational novelty.
When I say that code-generated virtual linguistic inscription does not
exist as language—that it does not take its place in our world as language—
the statement is proposed both philosophically and also as polemic, warning
against tendencies—of reading and writing—that threaten to become habits,
accustoming us to virtual symbolic practices that are merely a restricted and
sociopolitically implicated portion of the full human experience—including
the aesthetic experience—of language.
I take it as given that there is now a mass of code-mediated and code-
generated virtual linguistic inscription propagated throughout a significant
portion of the day-to-day worlds of our experience and interaction. Clearly,
we need to be able to distinguish and thus to be able to read some part of
this seething symbolic morass and so bring it into the world as language per
se. This is the point at which it may prove useful to invoke the principles
of media-constituted diegesis. Initially, we will take our examples and our
model from visuality but we will apply them to the strange and contingent
materialities of symbolic events and effects. In brief, we say that code-
generated linguistic artifacts and virtual language are juxtaposed, intersected,
overlaid on the digitally mediated surface of inscription: essentially, the

network as we now engage with it and as it is now, perhaps, a predominant
surface of inscription in the developed world. Language that has the potential
to be actualized will appear for us suddenly and catastrophically, or as
a function of performance, which is inherently a catastrophic process or
event. Language emerges, suddenly, from the chaos of symbolic events and
effects in so far as it appears to be readable to us, in so far it is constituted
by the diegetic world of human reading, or in so far as it is, by one or
other humans, literally, read. We then immediately perceive it as distinct
in terms of its diegesis, in terms of its medium, in terms of its virtual and
actualizable symbolic substance. Our acts of perception—mediated, if the
language is read for us—are suddenly acts of reading that require diegetic
distinction in order to proceed, in order to allow certain distinct symbols—
interconnected syntactically and semantically—to become a constitutive
part of the language we use and the language that also constitutes ourselves
in a located culture and in specific practices of human natural language.
Previously, to illustrate and exemplify media-constituted diegesis from
the domain of visuality, I turned to the work of John Baldessari; more
specifically, to those many and various “composite photoworks” of his in
which a diegesis of monochrome outlined geometric forms and silhouettes
overlays and interacts with the clearly distinct and immediately recognizable
diegesis of, usually, half-tone photographic naturalism (Figure 12.1).8 Both
of these instances of media-constituted diegesis are quite artificial, and
historically, contingently determined from the perspective of visuality in
human culture: for example, by color process and repertoire in the case
of the monochrome flat-color outline forms; or by focus, and depth-of-
field, and other effects of light-through-optics, fixed by chemical or digital
exposures, in the case of photographic naturalism.
FIGURE 12.1 John Baldessari. The Duress Series: Person Climbing Exterior Wall
of Tall Building/Person on Ledge of Tall Building/Person on Girders of Unfinished
Tall Building, 2003. Digital photographic print with acrylic on Sintra. 60 × 180
inches. Reproduction courtesy of John Baldessari.
We immediately distinguish the different diegetic worlds in this type of

image by Baldessari. We know that these worlds are entirely separate, in terms
of media practice, for example, and interrelate symbolically—as a function
of our interpretative visual “reading”—so as to generate the significance
and affect of the work as a whole. My suggestion is that virtual linguistic
artifacts distinguish themselves similarly, although from any diegetic world
or worlds in relation to which they appear. They make themselves literally
readable, in a manner that corresponds with the way in which the colored
monochrome silhouettes of the Baldessari make themselves metaphorically,
visually “readable.” In the case of the Baldessari, this allows the entire work
to be interpreted in the light of its distinct diegetic interrelations; in the
case of virtual linguistic artifacts, this allows the language to exist as such.
The analogous relations are particularly neat here, since the silhouettes
are “readable” (how?) as active human subjects radically distinct from the
world in which they (appear to? truly?) act.
Our next illustration is more directly indicative of the way that virtual
language appears, suddenly, catastrophically, as belonging to its own distinct
diegetic world. In the following series of figures, we encounter the strange,
singular distinction between, on the one hand, linguistic artifacts that are
depicted or represented visually and, on the other, language as such, coming
into being, distinguished from a visual field in contradistinction to which
it appears to be, if anything, “overlaid,” while simultaneously it has fully
entered into the diegesis of human readability.
In Figure 12.2a, consider the photographic image of the open book. Its
pages bear unreadable traces which nonetheless depict linguistic artifacts—
we know that they refer, visually, to language, but we cannot read it. It is
too small and out of focus, in accordance with the conventional media-
constituted world of photographic naturalism. In Figure 12.2b we are closer
to reading but our divorce from the world of reading is still in effect. The
same applies to Figure 12.2c, although perhaps we now feel we should be
able to read. In Figure 12.2d a paragraph has been brought into focus. This
is the only graphic alteration to the image. Its graphic traces are, ultimately,
from the same digital photograph as Figure 12.2c. The visual distinction
is trivial but sharp. And yet this is simply a kind of allusion to the much
sharper, more radical break—that I characterize as a diegetic break—
between virtual linguistic artifactuality and the sudden ontological presence
of actual language that we are able to read. This part of the image can
never more be simply a depiction of language. Its readability causes to it
to become language itself.9 We can now, if we wish, perform it as such, and
“give it voice.”
Our next step is to illustrate and examine cases of computationally
generated virtual linguistic artifacts, citing, in the first instance, my own
intrinsically unfinished sequence “Monoclonal Microphone.” This poetic
experiment in digital language art consists of a large, indeterminate number
FIGURE 12.2 Illustration, a–d, demonstrating the catastrophic emergence of

linguistic diegesis. Digital photographs, 2013. Courtesy of the author.
of potential poems generated by algorithmic processes transacting with

internet search. It arose from a process designed to generate an initial text
which subsequently served as the loose template for instances in the open-
ended set of potential poems that constitute the work. In the context of this
chapter, our purpose is to question the ontological status of the mass of
virtual linguistic artifacts that have been or could be produced.
The “first” text of “Monoclonal Microphone” is the poem-like
arrangement of title and nine lines of “verse” illustrated in the large gray
type of Figure 12.3a. The pseudo-code/constraints that generated this text
are as follows. The poem is composed from a two-word title and two-
word lines, each one an adjective preceding a singular noun, selected from
a digitized lexicon by quasi-random processes.10 Another simple algorithm
generated quasi-random couplet- or verse- divisions for the poem-like text
based on the occurrence of particular letters in a line. Potential adjective-
noun lines were also searched for in Google Books, double-quoted, to find
a (relative frequency) count for the possible line as a word sequence. Only
phrases with zero results (no hits) were selected. I call these word sequences
“zero counts.” At the time of searching they had not yet been indexed in the
Google Books “corpus.”
FIGURE 12.3 Screenshots based on a digital print by the author, Monoclonal

Microphone, 1020+1, 2011. Courtesy of the author.
Figure 12.3a prints 1,020 subsequent texts, here in a minute typeface.

As a function of my own further design, these poems share more than the
original generative constraints. I read and then read into the verses of the
first “Monoclonal Microphone” narrative and semantic arcs that can be
encoded in a speculative, elided grammar thus: After roomy parentage /
comes irresponsible falconry. // Homespun blockade reinforces / bodily
deliberation. // Oh unsound angler— // an antagonistic jamming of /
languorous motivation, / the infamous plasma of / closeted anatomy.
For the generation of the field of poems in Figure 12.3a, the number of
both lines and verses in the model was preserved and the literal composition
of the lines also follow the rules of verse-break generation. Note, for example,
that the letter e does not occur in any of the poems’ lines 6 thru 8, for this
reason. More significantly, collocated phrases including the above added
grammar words have been searched in Google to ensure that they do occur
in Google’s general corpus, with a count of 65 or greater. For example, from
the top-left-most poem in Figure 12.3b “after coincident” was searched,
as was “generalship comes” and “comes stratified.” When actually reading
(assuming this is graphically possible) any of the poems printed in Figure

12.3a, one should always be able to add in these same words from this
model—after, comes, reinforces, oh, a/an, of, the, of—and discover a more
determinate reading, one that is sometimes uncannily appropriate given the
relatively arbitrary and indeterminate processes that have otherwise given
rise to these texts.
As reproduced here, in Figure 12.3a, the 1,020 texts underlying their
initial seed and template text cannot be read by humans. However, their
virtual linguistic artifactuality is accurately represented by graphic traces
and I have, above, provided an exposition of the generative principles—
alluding in this case to actual code—that determine the disposition of the
graphic marks. In Figure 12.3b, a part of the same image has been scaled
up such that actual human reading of six instances of the text becomes
possible. I have read these poems; you may read them now. My question is
to ask: Is this enough? The six poems that you and I have now read certainly
exist. What about the rest that have not yet been “scaled up” for you?
There are a number of continuous “scales” of readability that we might
apply to our experiences of these texts and the virtual possibility of our
bringing them into actual language as we do so. The most obvious and
material of these is literal graphic scale. I scaled Figure 12.3b in order to
make six instances of the texts readable and, arbitrarily, so that they fitted
neatly beside the overall image (Figure 12.3a) of one plus 1,020 (unreadable)
texts. On a computer screen or tablet, Figure 12.3b could have been zoomed
in continuously. For particular readers, the texts may have entered human
readability at very different points during this zoom. However, the strange
and singular moment at which the text becomes readable will always have
what I call a “catastrophic” quality for human readers, demonstrating the
sudden diegetic break when a constructed artifactuality—up until this
moment ambiguously an artifactuality of, in this case, visual or linguistic
material—suddenly and unambiguously enters the world of language.
The other “scale” of readability that I want to invoke here is represented
by the extent and degree of our interpretive, critical attention to the code
and programmatic composition of the text. Earlier I referred to a possible
objection to my “strong” argument: that computationally generated text
does not exist as language until it comes into relationship with human
readability. Programmers may, compositionally, anticipate human readings
that their virtual text will generate and might argue that this is enough to
guarantee a relationship of some kind with human readability. Whatever
their program produces should be treated as language as such. I say that we
have here a number of continuous scales of attention to and interpretation
of these computational and compositional processes. For the work to exist,
as language, a human reader must still come to some catastrophic moment
in their experience of virtual linguistic artifacts when the work ceases
be ambiguously a set of arbitrary symbolic processes and also, suddenly,
becomes an actual event and effect of language. To approach this moment is

the purpose of critical software studies and also that of an expanded sense
of literary criticism that would embrace the kind of “reading” represented
by my description, above, of the pseudo-code corresponding to that which
generates the texts of “Monoclonal Microphone.”11 As programmer and
critic, I believe that I have made something that will make language; as
human reader, I do not believe that this language truly, actually exists as
such unless and until I can read it and, if I so wish, give it voice. It may also
be the case that, as I attempt to read, I find that the linguistic artifact before
me cannot, for whatever reason, be given voice. Or I refuse to give it voice.
I refuse to perform it. In this case, I may, naturally, deny its possibility of
crossing over into the world of language.
Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland’s Sea and Spar Between is
something of a tour de force of unambiguously literary, unambiguously
computational, digital language art.12 Recently the authors have, moreover,
produced a discussion of “creative code in comments,” as an online journal
article, “a discussion of (and an edition of)” this same work, Sea and Spar
Between. This extraordinary article is also executable JavaScript code—
the essential module from whatever is necessary to execute Sea and Spar
Between in most modern browsers—but with extended, eminently human-
readable and continuous comments, that explain the generative and, in the
authors’ view, creative processes of the code.13 Strickland is pioneer of fine
poetic writing—human composition—pointedly embedded within elaborate
digital media frameworks—the latter having both significant and affective
influence on the presentation and reception of her texts—in works such
as V—WaveSon.nets. V—losing l’una and slippingglimpse.14 Montfort’s
work often represents an epitome of computational software devices that
are coded to generate, without further human compositional intervention,
virtual linguistic artifacts, artifacts that do undoubtedly derive, from
their coding alone, a certain relationship with readability and, therefore,
in the terms at least of my more forgiving argument, might be considered
to produce actual language.15 In Sea and Spar Between, the two authors
work together, embedding literary compositional principles from Herman
Melville, and Emily Dickinson into their hard-coded data sets, and then
deploy Montfort’s considerable coding skills to build a piece of software
capable of generating “a number of stanzas comparable to the number of
fish in the sea, around 225 trillion.” Both Montfort and Strickland read
performatively from their computationally inflected or generated work in
public. Both have read together from Sea and Spar Between. My question,
in this context, is: What does their act of “giving voice” to (some part) of
the generated text perform? Is their performative reading what brings these
texts into the world of language?
I do not presuppose that there are simple or straightforward answers
to questions such as these. My concern is clearly with issues surrounding
human performative engagement with what may be indeterminate symbolic

processes, specifically performative engagements derived from cultures of
human reading. I am suggesting that a potential for actual human reading—
readability—brings virtual linguistic artifacts into the world as language.
At this point in my thinking, it is unclear to me whether an expositional
(metaphoric) “reading” of the processes in question—as undertaken in
Montfort and Strickland’s “cut to fit the tool-spun course”—is enough
to bring (all of) this virtual language into actuality. We can open up our
browsers and display a screen with many of the verses that can be generated
by the code; we can literally, conventionally read and consider these verses,
certainly bringing them—the displayed verses—into language. On the other
hand—as for Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes—it would
be literally impossible for anyone to read all of the possible verses. If we
can only bring some minuscule portion of a huge virtual linguistic artifact
into actual existence for our critical consideration, for our reading, does or
should the work exist at all? What is it beyond its “executable” description
and any “authorized” literary qualities—cited here from the highly regarded
work of canonical authors—that are inscribed in its data?
When we consider generated virtual linguistic artifacts, there is something
else that is given to them when they are read, apart, that is, from the
ontological gift of a more integral and actual existence as constituent of
language. Reading will associate the text read with any readers it acquires.
Its first human reader is likely to be identical with the person we are
accustomed to call its author. However, if linguistic artifacts are generated
without regard to their anticipated reading or if we do not accept that their
programmer’s anticipated virtual reading is enough to bring these artifacts,
potentially, into language, then it is possible for linguistic artifacts to make
traces on our screens (chiefly) without their having been associated with
any human individual. That aspect of the symbolic which reaches most
viscerally into our understanding of humanity and language is the proposal
that human language (human-readable symbolic practice) is precisely that
which, in so far as it is possible to inscribe, survives the absence of writer
(and/or first reader) and may thus survive the death of this person, while
still continuing to exist as language. I would propose that there is so such
possibility for virtual linguistic artifacts if they are not read or they are not
readable, if they do not form part of a human act, a performance of reading.
We might briefly consider a contrasting literary work, contrasting with
“Monoclonal Microphone” and Sea and Spar Between. Ironically perhaps,
this is a work by one of the exemplary early practitioners of digitally
mediated literature. Moreover, the work would be impossible to manage
and it would be impossible to generate certain of its outcomes (including
readable outcomes) without the affordances of digital mediation and the
network. I am referring to Skin: a story published on the skin of 2095
volunteers.16 This story has been composed by Shelley Jackson but we
cannot read it, as composed—not yet and, I believe, perhaps not ever. But
the story, as it was written, did have at least one human reader, Jackson,
whose authorial integrity is well attested. A total of 2,095 volunteers will
eventually contact Jackson and agree to have one of the story’s words
tattooed somewhere on their body. These words are inscribed on the mortal
flesh of the volunteers who read them, allowing, we presume, others with
whom they are close to read these words also. These individuals cannot
know or read the “whole story,” but they know it exists and that they
may be able to read it in some virtual future. The people with the tattoos
are called “words.” Some of them have already died; more of them may
do so. One day the story will be as complete as it will ever be. Words will
be missing, but there will remain a record of these words and the text of
the story will be, inherently—ontologically I would venture—recoverable
because, somewhat paradoxically, given that the entire story cannot be
read as published, this is a text that is maximally integrated with a very
particular and unusual but very powerful, ethical, moral, and mortal
culture of human reading.
§
Earlier in the course of this chapter, I proposed that if human reading is
required in order to affirm the ontological status of a linguistic artifact,
then an ethics of digital language arts practice was suggested. There is an
imperative to read and to perform works that might otherwise remain
indistinguishable from that part of chaos which consists in symbolic noise
and insignificant, inaffective transaction. There is also now, I believe, a
politics and a social ethics. At this current moment in history, symbolic
processes are propagated over networked programmable media in order to
provide services of various kinds for human users. We agree, by using these
services, to (generally speaking) non-mutual, non-reciprocal terms of use.
These processes are undoubtedly addressed to humans, but they are now set
running on systems that manage data and interactions on a scale that makes
effective human interaction, including any comprehensive reading—even of
indexes and aggregations—more or less impossible. Moreover, the processes
are motivated, primarily, so as to direct attention (toward advertisement)
or to allow transaction (chiefly commercial), all in order to accumulate
marginal profits on behalf of the service providers. Such a statement is,
perhaps, part of one human, but distant reading of the symbolic practice
that is generated as a kind of sociopolitical metatext by these processes. It
is not a literal, interpretive reading of this “text” in terms of language, in
terms of its significance and affect as a chaotic, implicated mass of linguistic
artifacts. It is not the sort of reading that would bring the symbolic practices
of network services into the being of language as such. For such a reading
to be possible, these processes would have to become commensurate with
human experience, with the full extent and range of significance and
affect that we ascribe to human readers. This, they are not. They focus on
those aspects of our shared world that are overdetermined by commerce
and control and, ultimately, ill-distributed power. Our situation calls for a
reading and a performance of the virtual, pseudo-language with which we
now constantly transact and which constantly draws our attention. I believe
that if we attempt such a reading we will find that there is very little, among
the countless, ever-spinning threads of big data on the internetworked web-
cloud, that we would be able to bring into the actually existing world of
language. Other kinds of writing must continue to be made and given voice,
writing that can be read and that will exist.
13
Reconfiguration: Symbolic Image
and Language Art
“Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces” (CRCI) was the

title of a small, studio-like conference at Brown University that took place
in March 2016.1 It was organized by a faculty dancer and choreographer
keen to better understand the impact of networked computational devices
on the theory and practice—the culture—of embodied human movement,
particularly aestheticized human movement. As such it was one of many,
many such conferences that continue to be convened across the widest
possible range of cultural—our focus is artistic—practices, all of which—
since at least the 1990s—are called to respond to what we experience as a
new cultural architecture within which all these cultural practices suddenly
and ever more comprehensively find themselves dwelling and working and
making. Despite the fact that this networked and computational architecture
is more or less ubiquitous in the developed and developing worlds,
organizers of such gatherings still bring together participants who tend to
be outliers or avant-gardists in their practices, specialists who have been
diverted from more conventional trajectories by the promises and perils of
“digital media.” Moreover, expertise in networked computation may trump
certain commitments to a particular practice—ostensibly choreography in
our anecdote—that is supposed to be bringing participants together. The
interests, engagements, and actual practices of our participants may be
wildly disparate.
So, in this venue, the question is asked, “What is it that our practices
share? What is it that we all do?” This is a difficult question to answer,
particularly difficult in the form of a word or phrase that might indicate
a shared medium, or characterize an artistic school, or serve as an agreed
term to which practitioners, critics, and theorists might refer. I am a writer,
and I was invited to this conference because—as I saw it—I work with
networked and computationally enabled transactive synthetic language.
Such language is beginning to be quasi-autonomously sited in devices which,

precisely because they simulate human transaction in aurality, and because
such transaction is definitive of embodiment as human, should, indeed,
be considered as choreographic interfaces. As a participant at the CRCI,
however, I remained a writer, not a choreographer or dancer. I attempted,
awkwardly, to formulate an answer that would span the disparities.
“We are the artists whose media—by which I mean the plural of medium—
are being reconfigured before their eyes, within their hearing, under their feet,
in their very hands. Our practices share an urgent need to respond to these
circumstances, because they present us with crisis, catastrophe, pharmakon,
existential challenge.”2 The implication was and is that digitization and
digitalization have, historically, produced a reconfiguration of all media.3
Artists do, of course, experience this as novel (as, indeed, “new media”), as
stimulating, as opportunity. At the same time, they confront its effects as
interruption, disturbance and, perhaps at best, reconfiguration, where these
circumstances have impacts on the very substance and materials with which
they work, with which they make their art. The crisis—these circumstances
as pharmakon, as both poison and potential therapy—arises from the once
again historical evidence that this fundamental reconfiguration is driven by
forces that are overdetermined by neoliberal modernity, focused on scientistic
economic values, on the reconfiguration of cultural and social welfare as subject
to principles of efficient, market-driven resolution—where resolution is self-
referentially defined within the enclosed logic of neoliberal economics and the
contemporary regime of computation that provides its services, while building
this same logic out into the “civilized” world as Big Software architecture.4
An example with regard to my own current practice. Technological
developments in natural language processing (NLP), digital audio, segmental
analysis—automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis—have given
rise to what I call transactive synthetic language (TSL). This is rolled out to
the general public in the service of retail networks, focused on the ideals of
frictionless commerce and consumerism, while discovering or anticipating, in
the process, its “killer application” to domotics, easy control of the “smart
home.”5 Nonetheless, TSL becomes perceptible to me as a fundamental
reconfiguration of linguistic production and reception, of language, of my
medium as a writer, and it is available to me as affordable hardware connected
to low-to-no-cost network functions. Moreover, the top-level service
providers have gifted us with an application programming interface (API) for
the “voice services” in question—I can make my own transactive linguistic
artifacts within and across this network of actors and affordances. Any such
work that I make will, necessarily, be implicated with all the other—many
unforeseen—consequences of the underlying systems and networks. Among
the most striking of these is surveillance—otherwise cast as the collection
of anonymized “data,” the benefits of which are reflected back to us in the
guise of Big Data once this is owned and aggregated by the service providers,
RECONFIGURATION 201
thus making themselves and us—supposedly—better, where the only real

certainty is that this process makes them richer and us better at making them
richer.6 Meanwhile our understanding of surveillance and marketing and—to
get back to my own concern—language has changed, fundamentally.
But as an artist-maker in these circumstances, with beautiful new materials
to work with, what can I do? There is a kind of imperative, regardless of the
consequences, just to “get stuck in” and make something. When it comes
down to answering the same, “what can I do?” but in terms of what it is
possible for me to do, we return, I believe to reconfiguration, this time to
reconfiguration as an aesthetic, generative response to the reconfiguration of
media that has been imposed by networked computation. It is the fact that
my newly chosen medium is a technologically mediated reconfiguration of
my underlying medium which, itself, imposes a constraint on my subsequent
practice. What I make with the newly reconfigured language, with TSL, will
be made by reconfiguring the computational networks that have brought
TSL into existence, not, that is, for example, by building a new and separate
computational network for TSL. Even were this to be possible for me or my
fellow artists, this would still amount to a responsive gesture, essentially a
highly redundant and culturally isolated response that would, in the end,
amount to no more than the kind of reconfiguration that actually is within
my, our range of possibilities.
At the CRCI, after some further discussion and in part-response to my
remarks, a participant suggested that we might call ourselves, collectively
and as characteristic of the practices we share, “the reconfigurationists.”7
This chapter is already an exploration of what this might mean. In what
follows, briefly, I will discuss, most specifically, certain aspects of poetic
reconfiguration in language art. But I will also discuss reconfiguration as a
poetics of computation and of networked computation in general. Within
“reconfiguration” and “reconfigure” we easily discover “configuration,”
“configure,” “figure,” and even “figuration.” The “figure” at more or less the
root of these words, I will discuss in terms of what I call “symbolic image.”
This term bears a certain relation to Vilém Flusser’s “technical image” but
rather than proposing a transcendence of writing and history constrains its
application to what we perceive as the figurable content of aesthetic artifacts
regardless of medium, and the “symbolic” qualifier is taken to further restrict
our attention to images that are co-produced with the symbolic processes
of (networked) computation.8 We are used to the proposition that “images”
as such may come to our critical attention when we experience an aesthetic
linguistic artifact—a poem, a short story. Analogously, once language has
been reconfigured by networked computation, a reconfigurationist writer
may compose the kind of linguistic artifact by means of which we may
experience “symbolic images” in the sense that I will begin to elaborate. I
will also compare the properties and methods of my proposed “symbolic
images” and reconfigurationist artifacts with those that are associated with
the “New Aesthetic,” one of the few terms in current art-critical discussion
that addresses a poetics of computation explicitly.9
Critical discourse is conversant with a specialist, mildly metaphoric
usage for the term “image” such that it may be applied without regard
to the medium in which an image is expressed—an image in language, an
image in music. Nonetheless, in the discussion of New Aesthetic, actual
visual examples tend to predominate, and these visual images (often also
“visualizations”) may be marked by perceptible breaks in the visual field
that are the trace of computationally generated artifactuality (although
usually referred to—and I consider this a misdirection—as “virtual” or
“virtuality”). I characterize these breaks as media-constituted and have,
previously, analyzed them in terms of diegesis.10 For a particular New
Aesthetic visual image (in both senses of “image”), for example, there may
be diegeses constituted by photo-naturalism and by computer-generated
graphics. A quick internet image search for “New Aesthetic” will bring up
many images within which this distinction is clear and marked—computer
graphic “sprites” are found sharing the visual field with conventional color
photography but clearly arriving within this field from “another world,”
another media-constituted diegesis.
The work of Clement Valla is frequently cited as an example of the New
Aesthetic and I can illustrate what I mean, in a more subtle form and one
more broadly applicable across media (mediums), in a brief discussion of
his Postcards from Google Earth, using the same illustration as that in the
engaging manifesto for the “New Aesthetic” by Curt Cloninger (Figure 13.1).11
FIGURE 13.1 One of a still growing archive of images—this is tagged “redmon”—

from Postcards from Google Earth by Clement Valla, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.
RECONFIGURATION 203
Valla finds “sites” in Google Earth where the algorithmic transformation of

photographic satellite imagery into 3D images—to be projected onto our 2D
computer monitors—appears to fail or, rather, produces a strikingly unusual
image. He takes snapshots of these sites and turns them into “postcards.”
Presumably, altitude and contour data for the satellite images are used to
produce 3D transforms and this “fails”—as in the image illustrated—when
pixels that photographically represent what is typically an architectural
object, such as a bridge, are treated in the same way as pixels that represent
their underlying topography, which is the source of the altitude and contour
data. On the face of it this presents itself to the human viewer as error or as
“glitch,” and Valla’s—along with much digitally mediated art—is sometimes
mistakenly associated with what is, in fact, a quite distinct “glitch aesthetic”
in computational practice. It is up to the theorists of the New Aesthetic to
clarify its relationship to glitch. In setting out from a New Aesthetic analysis
but denying “error” as significantly or affectively operative in a work like
Postcards, my aim is to propose symbolic image as a more appropriate term
for work of this kind and a better analytical starting point.
For the composition and appreciation of Valla’s Postcards, there are still
(at least) two media-constituted diegeses in my terms: that of the source
satellite imagery (a kind of remote photo-naturalism), and that of the
3D-for-2D transform. The latter is the product of both digitization—the
photographic data’s abstract symbolic representations as encoding—and
algorithmic manipulation—processing on the basis of this abstract symbolic
representation in terms of regular computational operations that may be
considered typical of contemporary cultural symbolic practices. On both
counts the adjectival qualifier “symbolic” may be considered appropriate,
and therefore I say that the entire visual field of a Valla postcard itself
constitutes a symbolic image. The misperceived “glitch” is, rather, a function
of the typical and regular properties and methods of symbolic imagery. The
apparent mistreatment of the bridge is actually, in a sense, attributable to the
failure of photo-naturalism (and its associated metadata) to distinguish a
break (easily perceptible to humans) between the media-constituted diegesis
of architecture and that of natural topography.12
So, we may say, the “figure” of Valla’s Postcard, its “figuration,” is a
symbolic image, and it seems to me appropriate to further delineate such
an image as, typically, also a “configuration” since it must be composed in
conjunction with other figurative, image-generative systems. While figurative
systems of this kind are far from new—photography and cartography are,
of course, figurative systems that have, over a long period, been configured
for aesthetic making—historically, networked computation has led to the
proliferation of such systems and has guaranteed their ever-increasing
cultural reach and momentum. Furthermore, the practice of computation
has, itself, elaborated a special and appropriate sense of “configuration”—as
the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “To choose or design a configuration
for; to combine (a program or device) with other elements to perform a

certain task or provide a certain capability,” with the earliest quoted usage of
this kind dated 1965. While the production of symbolic images may require
coding and custom software, it is almost universally the case that such artist-
authored programming performs what I am identifying as configuration with
respect to one or more existing, usually larger, systems. Since the early years
of the twenty-first century, such systems have, as I suggested above, come
to constitute the Big Software architecture of our civilized culture in so far
as it is mediated by networked computation. Configuration may, therefore,
be proposed as the name for an aesthetic practice having its own distinct
poetics, for the generation of symbolic images that are intended to inform
and delight us with regard to our newly mediated cultural experience.
Then, finally, the justification for the “re-” of “reconfiguration” relates
to the fact that there is a determinative and, for the time being, unilaterally,
inequitably, and hierarchically implemented configuration that Big Software
imposes on cultural practices in circumstances that were referred to earlier.
For the artist, I have suggested, their media (mediums) are now subject
to substantive configuration by software architectures and for certain
practitioners and theorists—if not for all of us—this is experienced as a crisis,
a pharmakon, an existential challenge. A large part of aesthetic making will
be, in these circumstances, stimulated by an imperative to respond, to react,
and to engage in a poetics of, I propose, reconfiguration in order to generate
those symbolic images that are demanded from us as part of a broader
cultural poetics that is commensurate with networked computation, one
that bears—one would hope—enough significance and affect to influence
the trajectory of ongoing historical processes that might otherwise render
us artless and careless.
When we discussed Clement Valla’s work with the reconfiguration of
contemporary digital photography and remote imaging in his Postcards,13
it was important for us to remark that although this work is based on the
configuration of remote photo-naturalism and Google’s distinct algorithmic
processes that attempt to render this remote photo-naturalism as 3D-for-
2D, the entirety of the visual field of a postcard is subject to the same regular
processes of first more or less conventionally understood photographic
apparatuses and then algorithmic processes. The image is an integration, a
synthesis of what may also be seen as two media-constituted diegeses and
the misperceived “glitches”—the apparent, human-perceptible disruptions
and distortions in the postcard images—are actually to be referred back
to a more striking diegetic break in the subject of the initial remote images
(topography vs. architecture). In the materiality of the postcard image itself—
which I call a symbolic image for the reasons of configuration given—there
is no break: its pixels are positioned and colored as a function of image-
generative symbolic synthesis. It is important to remark this characteristic
lest we be seduced by those visual images in which there are marked and
RECONFIGURATION 205
obvious—“graphic”—media-constituted breaks into thinking that this

is what sets them apart as, for example, New Aesthetic, leaving work in
which the visual field appears “unbroken” out of account. In my terms,
this makes it more difficult to distinguish “glitch” from symbolic image
and, more importantly, it prevents us from discovering the commonalities
of reconfigurative practices across other media (mediums). Within a single
auditory experience of music, for example, the “worlds” of distinct stylistic
musical “diegeses” may be sharply distinguishable to trained ears, while
for other, less cultivated, listeners a single musical world is experienced.
The human ear’s unfiltered, minimally directed, fundamentally continuous
experience of sound as the medium of music is reasserted for those listeners
without an apparatus to experience it as articulated by distinct stylistic
diegeses. As we turn our attention to linguistic artifacts in order to explore
certain ways in which symbolic, algorithmic process may generate symbolic
images in reconfigurations of language as the medium of the work, we
should first consider certain media specificities of language.
Language only ever exists as a function of readability, or, minimally, as
a function of bearing some kind of significant and affective relationship
to readability.14 What we read are grammé, distinct units of inscription,
at various levels of linguistic structure. These units of inscription are only
perceptible, and thus readable, as distinct from whatever else they are not,
and this “whatever” could, in principle, be made of anything material,
although it is usually either aural (vocalized sound to be read as speech)
or visual (graphically inscribed writing). Language comes into being—into
the world of human experience where we may use it as a medium to make
other things—as a function of a fundamental media-constituted break with
its own material supports and also as a function of continually reasserted
breaks between all of its constituent elements.
It is important to set out this aspect of language’s singularity for at
least two reasons. In the first place, because this means that any and all
higher-order (media-constituted) diegetic breaks within a linguistic artifact
between conventional linguistic images and, for example, forms of language
generated by algorithms or symbolic processes will always coincide with
one or more of the lower-order symbolic breaks that constitute language
as such. It will never be absolutely clear—from the material support of
the language in question—whether a particular break occurs to mark the
intervention of symbolic process or simply because the break is required
in order to allow its material forms to be read as language.15 Second, the
differences that constitute language as such are structurally the same as
those that constitute the regular formal “languages” that are used for the
transcription of algorithms, programs, and so on—for the inscription of the
symbolic processes that enter into the synthesis of symbolic image.16 As such,
not only can the virtual linguistic output of symbolic process be seamlessly
intermixed (“seamfully camouflaged” would, ironically, be more accurate
here) with conventional linguistic images, but “tokens” and “snippets” of

the regular formal languages that are used to transcribe symbolic processes
may also be intermixed with natural language without necessarily exposing
a break in the material form of a hybrid, intermixed linguistic inscription.
This can give rise to serious confusions concerning the characteristics of
certain contemporary linguistic artifacts and can make the task of close
reading such artifacts complex and difficult.17
The poetic generative work of Nick Montfort demonstrates what I
mean along with other characteristic of the symbolic image in language art
practice.18 Montfort’s work is simultaneously literary and programmatically
virtuosic. It is also often minimalist and therefore relatively easy to read. In
PPG256 Montfort composes the formal language of Perl into tiny programs
(256 characters or less) that encode an astonishing measure of significant
and affective English poetic compositional procedure.19 Many of Montfort’s
tiny programs are designed to run endlessly (i.e., regularly, computationally),
generating virtual language that is not only readable; it also expresses
patterns of aurality-targeted sound and proto-semantic sense that may be
referred to the formal rhetoric of poetry. These texts are, typically, spewed
out in verses or fragments that present themselves as, simply, pieces of
language. Any diegetic break between, on the one hand, the regular encoded
manipulation of abstract literal tokens, and on the other, poetic language
(that might be the composition of a human author) is smoothed over by
the language itself and its presentation (as continuous lineated output). We
can read the major break that does dwell within and constitute the work by
close reading both program and output. Deconstructing the programmatic
Perl, we may understand exhaustively how the patterns of tokens are
assembled. Close reading the output, while much of it is poetry, we agree, we
will also often find lines and passages where abstract pattern generation fails
to produce anything that enough of us would agree to call “poetry.” These
instances of virtual language are then, just that. They fail to be readable as
or in order to become actual language and thus they serve to make visible
(beyond any material form of the intermixed linguistic output) the break
between generative proto-linguistic pattern and language as such.
For, when our attention is turned to linguistic artifacts—with regard to
which we have proposed that any perceptible breaks in the material form
of the artifact are masked or doubled by breaks that are constitutive of the
artifact’s very medium—the mark of a higher order break (or its synthesis)
will be discovered by the perception of dissonances between the actual syntax
of the artifact and natural linguistic models of syntax (grammar) that have
been cultivated by the human reader. It is not only difference/différance that
is constitutive of natural language. Not in any case for the common human
reader. Grammar, extending to word choice, to diction, is also required. This
is one of a number of reasons that symbolic image in language is resisted
by readers despite the relative media-specific “invisibility” of its breaks. If
RECONFIGURATION 207
language that “looks like language” on the surface proves to be recalcitrant,

it may be considered to be not only “broken” (and thus, perhaps, redeemably
readable as the synthesis of conventional linguistic image and symbolic
process); rather, it may simply be considered and judged as not (actual)
language at all.
In certain branches of my own practice that I would be comfortable
analyzing in terms of symbolic image and reconfiguration, I work together
with symbolic process in order to smooth over the kind of breaks that
might otherwise incline my readers to judge my linguistic artifacts as “not
language” in this way. [n-gram] Loose Links are quasi-algorithmic micro-
collages.20 They are constructed around the concept of the “longest common
phrase,” as developed in the context of The Readers Project.21 A longest
common phrase is, for any attributed text, a sequence of its words that can be
found elsewhere in a multi-author corpus but not attributable to the original
author, thus proving, minimally, that it is still an attested, discoverable part
of the commons of language. For the Loose Links these provide a model for
the links in its quasi-algorithmic processes of serial micro-collage. This is the
opening part of “I had a visit today …”:
I had a visit today, for monitoring, from almost the only group that
ever comes to me, rather than me going to them. I needed to make it
about them and their needs, not about me and my needs. I needed a new
atmosphere, a new environment, and I found it and I’m extremely excited
and happy: people with bipolar disorder will have a mixture of negative
and positive feeling all at the same time, and in time, and in your own
time, etc.22
The typical longest common phrase is—currently, in natural language corpora

of English—between three and five words in length. “I had a visit today …”
starts by internet searching for results containing the first four words of its
title and proceeds with searching for another similar-length phrase that had
been contained in the first author-selected result, and so on, with another
and another phrase in the selected results of subsequent searches, linked by
the search phrases to compose the final text. The processes deployed are
quasi-algorithmic in that they require the regular computational services of
internet search and also because the micro-compositional procedure could
be set out as looping pseudo code, with a human author intervening for the
selection of particular results and also of subsequent linking phrases. In this
work, the length of the phrase all but guarantees—sometimes with a little
tweaking—syntactic continuity across the linked language. In the passage
quoted there are five different results and the linking phrases are very
difficult to determine. The piece is an assemblage of found natural linguistic
images. As a whole, it is symbolic image because symbolic processes engaged
with syntactic continuity are used both for networked computational search
and also in order to link the found linguistic images together. Ironically, this
particular process also “heals” what might otherwise have been instances of
grammatical dissonance indicating the main constituent diegeses within the
symbolic image. In terms of reconfiguration, internet search configures the
potential discovery of the natural linguistic images and, as a language artist,
I have reconfigured this Big Software cultural architecture to produce my
reconfigurationist symbolic image in language.
Francesca Capone’s Primary Source provides us, in conclusion, with an
example of reconfigurationist symbolic image, the production of which is
more clearly, and in the contemporary moment more typically, involved
with prosthetic technologies—transactive devices—that are configured by
Big Software and may be reconfigured in order to produce aesthetic images,
in this case, those associated with a delightful, minimal performance of
poetically implicated language that Capone has rendered as a video
installation with, effectively, multi-channel presentation, and as an artifact
“existing in a hybrid space between a chapbook and artists book.”23
Primary Source manifested itself in the course of practice-based research,
when the artist discovered, on Brown University Library’s subterranean
poetry shelves, a Russian language book with a striking cover design, set
with a quasi-regular grid in the manner of Mondrian and de Stijl, and
sparsely populated with the words of the book’s title. These words, Russian
in the Cyrillic alphabet, were initially unreadable to Capone. Capone made
use of the WordLens app on her mobile phone to try and decipher the title.
Figure 13.2 shows the cover and four pages from Capone’s chapbook.
The cover displays an image of the artist’s phone, running WordLens, itself
showing an acquired image of the Russian source book’s cover before
WordLens has attempted to provide a visualized translation into English.
Transcribed and conventionally translated, this is the cover of Den’ poėzii
(Day of Poetry), the 1962 volume of an annual that was published by the
Soviet Writer publishing house in Moscow from 1956. To the immediate
right of the cover we see one of many translations offered by WordLens
FIGURE 13.2 The cover and four pages (on two openings) from Francesca Capone’s
Primary Source. Courtesy of the artist.
RECONFIGURATION 209
when it was set to translate from Russian to English. The other three images
show differing configurations, and the fourth is the detail of a reading from
the top right of the grid.
WordLens, released by Octavio Good in 2010, is an application broadly
associated with so-called “augmented reality.” Typically, such applications
use the camera of a mobile device to capture images from the “real” world
and then “augment” these images with layers of visual or textual information.
WordLens tries to find and capture the images of words—the graphic forms
of words in any language—and then translate these words or phrases into
one of a number of possible host languages, selected by the user and would-
be reader. On screen, WordLens then replaces the reality-supplied word-
image with the image of a supposedly corresponding—“translated”—word
in the user’s selected language. WordLens worked remarkably well. It was
acquired by Google in 2014 and is now incorporated into Google Translate.
When WordLens was applied to the grid-embedded title of this Russian
book, Capone discovered a virtual linguistic beauty in the augmented reality
that it proposed to her. WordLens successfully translated the title itself, but its
would-be prosthetic, word-form-seeking sensory apparatus was “confused”
by the cover’s de Stijl grid. It is likely that WordLens looks for text as, itself,
a more or less regular grid-like pattern, and so it also tries to “read” what,
to our non-augmented eyes, is purely formal grid, finding language-symbolic
“differences” where we do not. Moreover, the differences that WordLens
sees are tiny, affected by slight movements or changes of focus and light.
These cause WordLens to revise its reading continually—even when set to
interpret from a single language—and, effectively, to produce an animated
sequence of textual events as it reads and rereads the grid and successively
augments its screen-projected reality with changing virtual text. What we
see has immediate appeal for us as creatures who read. It is not simply
that WordLens distorts and disturbs the visual field in a way that is merely,
sensually, pleasant for us. WordLens pretends to read the image itself and
there it discovers language for us in a structured field the potential symbolic
understanding of which is, perhaps, expressed at a resolution or in a form
that eludes our merely human visual acuity.
Capone’s composite video captures the animated, flickering engagement
of WordLens with translation, with actual words in a language that is
unknown to her and a grid that the algorithm also reads and misreads as
language. The symbolic image of her work is a synthesis of conventional
translation and a number of symbolic processes that are intended to augment
the human facility for translation. WordLens (re)configures translation. It is
significant that it renders translation through visuality, attempting, literally,
to overlay the visual forms of untranslated words that it discovers in an
image with the visual forms of translated words. It configures translation as
transfiguration. WordLens begins with the technology of optical character
recognition (OCR)—this is one of the chief symbolic processes that it brings
to Capone’s reconfigured symbolic image—but then applies further NLP in

order to find, generate, and configure a translation of whatever it has read.
Having discovered the real-time effects of WordLens’s configuration of
the events or mise en scène of translation—here, Capone’s desire to translate
the title of a book that interested her—the artist goes on to reconfigure this
mise en scène such that it reproduces the effects that she discovered—an
animated engagement with the book as poetry, the cover of a particular
chosen book, and a poetry that underlies its poetry. This is an account of the
making of the work that is now Primary Source, a symbolic image, expressed
as a video installation and a hybrid print publication, and proposed as
animated visual poetry, as a visualized poetics.
Read here as reconfigurationist, Capone’s work also, as it happens,
illustrates the precarity of contemporary artists who work with (re)
configured media (mediums), who work with the increasingly predominant
cultural configurations of networked computation. As we mentioned,
WordLens was acquired for Google Translate in 2014. The configuration and
transfiguration of translation that Capone worked with has now changed. In
fact, her reconfigurationist gesture became historical before it was publicly
exhibited. To understand Primary Source fully we already have to set it in a
particular context—which has changed for commercially implicated reasons
having little to do with aesthetic practice—rather than simply being able to
appreciate it as an earlier contribution to an ongoing practice. This is too
often the case with regard to work in new or digital media for the same or
analogous reasons. It is, perhaps, the greatest challenge of reconfigurationist
poetics—to make aesthetic artifacts that have enough cultural value and
momentum so as to be able to reconfigure cultural practice itself, redirecting
it away from vectors of carelessness, greed, and stupidity, toward human
carefulness and careful art.
14
At the End of Literature
Literature is made with language. In certain contexts, literature is proposed

as the art of language, its highest art. We may contest the range and extent
of literature with regard to practices of language as a whole, and we may
not agree that the horizons of these practices coincide with the horizons
of art that is or may be made from language. Performative, time-based
linguistic practices, for example, may not be accepted as unequivocally
within the domain of literature, although they are, nonetheless, embraced
and appreciated as aesthetically, culturally valuable at the highest levels.
At the beginning of this twenty-first century, works designated as poetry
or (literary) fiction are generally accepted as literature, all but regardless
of quality if not subgenre. Dramatic writing, however, must contest its
place as literature to the extent that it is readable in a form that submits to
textual practices, effectively print publication—taking this form according
to relatively arbitrary conventions of transcription and, indeed, remediation
(as “literal” literature)—and also, importantly, in so far as it is studied and
critiqued within literature’s discursive frameworks: within the university or
the world of letters. If we consider actual artifacts of dramatic writing to
be oral performances of language that come to exist, chiefly, in aurality (as
much as they do in other media—visual, gestural, architectural, etc.), then
it becomes possible to acknowledge that our conceptions of literature and
of language art, particularly in terms of the cultural significance of specific
artifacts, are not media-agnostic. The relationships of literature with media
are historically determined, culturally contingent, prejudiced, and, I will
argue, disordered with respect to technological developments. The existing
relationships generate aporias that threaten to become critical over time.
They deform and distort our appreciation of language art in other media.
They cause us to ask ourselves how and why should we value the significance
and affect that such work generates.
This problematic—how to appreciate electronic literature or, more
generally, language art in digital media—has preoccupied theorists and
practitioners since the beginning of the undoubtedly literary history

associated with these practices in the mid-1990s. I say “undoubtedly literary”
because it is a matter of record that electronic literature found early, if not
unprecedented, theoretical and critical support for its nascent practices in the
discursive space of the universities. Although attention to media specificities
(distinctly plural) has been properly claimed in order to take into account
the incorporation of other media into practices of literary composition and
reception, less attention has been directed to any better understanding of
the underlying medium of the underlying art. This medium is language and
its underlying art is an art of language. The introduction of other media—
into practices for the composition and reception of language art—has
demonstrably and necessarily broken conventional form. In themselves,
such breaks render their artifacts no longer (exclusively, traditionally)
literature. Theorists and practitioners of the new forms claim that, in these
circumstances, literature must change. But breaking conventional form
is nothing new, even across media. What is new—supporting the original
claim—is some historically important manner in which literature is called to
change—paradigmatically, conceptually, fundamentally. Literature needs to
become “electronic,” by which we mean (with hindsight) that it must come
to terms with the digitalization of everything.
The digital—inevitably misrepresented as “electronic” for the rhetorical
purposes of the claim that literature must change—is not a medium.
More precisely, it is not a medium of interest to the majority of theorists
or practitioners of those arts for which language is the medium. There are
aesthetic practices of computation and of properly digital art, with respect
to which the digital can be accounted as a or the medium, but only certain
specialist practices of electronic literature incorporate computational
aesthetics significantly or affectively. For media taken as the plural of medium,
the digital is, rather, a prevalent and privileged framework and network
for any and all media. These media—color, shape, texture, sound, and so
on—are encoded in sometimes complex, structured binary transcriptions
that render these digitized representations accessible to and manipulable
by computational, digital affordances. For media such as these, which are
referred to substantive material, digital representations are problematic in
many interesting ways characterized by our understanding of significant and
affective differences between analog and digital objects or artifacts, and yet
there is a phenomenological coherence in terms of the human experiences of
these things across the analog–digital divide since they are also necessarily
referred to human perception—of color, shape, texture, sound, and so on.
The relationship between linguistic artifacts and digitization is, on the
other hand, singular. A string of bytes that represents a color, however
structured by coding conventions, is not the color itself. By contrast, a
string of bytes representing a string of letters and punctuation is language,
ontologically, in so far as it is humanly readable. There is no essential
AT THE END OF LITERATURE 213
difference between any instance of language as it is embodied “here” and

“now” on the page or surface in front of you and how it is encoded as
a string of bits inside your machine. Its existence as language is entirely
dependent on your ability to read it. If you are able to read traces (grammē)
of this language on any other “surfaces” within any part of a computational
system, your reading brings that language into being. The string of bits
digitized from existing systems of inscription is always already structured
as traces of language that are, in principle, if not in practice, readable. It is
not encoded so as to enable the rendering of an object in another medium
that because of this rendering becomes perceptible as an instance of an
object in that medium. Perception of digitization is not perception of what
it encodes. The digital representation of color and sound, for example, is not
perceptible as such within digital systems. By contrast, when presented with
traces of language, in any material form, all the human subject needs to do is
read. Any perceptibility (or not) with regard to the material form in question
is irrelevant except in so far as it simply enables or disables actual reading.
What is at stake for language and language art in digital media is not a
supposed ontological distinction between language and digital language in so
far as this is a function of digitization. Whereas it does make sense to speak of
a distinction between yellows (yellows in our perceptible world) and digital
yellows (encodable and renderable yellows), it makes no sense to speak of a
purported distinction between words and digital words. Instead we must turn
our attention to effects of digitalization on the substantive media that can
support traces of language and their potential for human reading.
Within the much wider domain of linguistic practice, what has occurred,
indisputably, since the post–Second World War rise of distributed computation
is, fundamentally, the digitization of typography and typographic design, the
digitization of particular aspects of visuality that are structured so as to
support linguistic practices that derive, for the most part, from print-based
textuality. In general, and historically, when we speak of electronic literature
we speak of a textuality that has activated certain digital affordances with
respect to digitized typography. In print, typographic visuality is static, fixed,
although it may be spatialized in a number of ways so as to influence or
inflect reading practices and strategies. By contrast, even with relatively basic
peripherals, digitized typography has nearly all the affordances of print and
is provisioned, additionally, with a wide array of dynamic potentialities. Text
in digital media can move and change. It’s as simple as that. It is important,
however, to recognize that this is not a difference in what is or can be read but
in how and when it is read. The digitization of typography has given us new
expressive structures for temporalities that have the potential to influence
and change the fundamental events of language: our events of reading.
Thus, the fact that there is no ontological distinction between language
and digital language does not mean that digital textuality—digitized
typography—as compositional media and expressive form can be reduced
to textuality as modeled by the more constrained expressive potentialities

of print. That ship has long sailed. And if literature is a practice that is
determined, chiefly, by material cultural formations that orbit practices
and conventions of reading, then it is literature that faces its ontological
challenge with respect to digitalization. Electronic literature is, precisely, no
longer literature; if it is anything, then it is digital language art, although
currently it still struggles within the gravity of an “electronic literature”
that is overdetermined by aesthetically motivated language expressed in the
substantive medium of digitized typographic visuality. Even as such, within
the constraints of existing practices, the digitization of typographic visuality
tends to facilitate new ways of reading, especially less familiar temporalities
of reading, and new relationships between reader action and what is read
(hypertextual and conditional linking). For most readers, even including
critics, literary scholars, and digital humanists, these strategies trouble
existing traditions of literary reading without yet insisting that literature
itself be called, seriously, into question.
Throughout this thinking, a particular conception of reading is crucial. I
speak of reading in a specific technical sense. I use to read and its cognates—
in a manner fully consistent with its etymology—to refer to whatever it is
that we language animals do when we discern and interpret linguistic forms,
regardless of support medium. This is not the type of metaphoric usage that
obtains when we speak of “reading” a painting or a dance. It refers to the
process of grasping and understanding traces of language as such in any
medium. In this thinking, once it comes into existence, language is not only
discrete and articulated, it is distinctly separable from other phenomena of
the perceptible world, made and marked by what Jacques Derrida indicated
as différance.1 Virtual linguistic forms establish a break with the perceptible
matter of which they are formed precisely in that catastrophic, no-turning-
back moment when they are grasped as language by both the language
animal who makes the traces and a language animal who reads them. I call
this process grammalepsis and I consider it to be generative of language,
ontologically. Reading brings language into substantive being as instances of
interhuman potentialities. To clearly distinguish reading in this sense from
the subsumed and more specific activity that we undertake when, typically,
we visually scan and interpret instances of writing, we could use the phrase
grammaleptic reading, but so long as we recall, throughout this thinking,
that this special sense of reading is equally what we do when we hear
and understand spoken language in aurality (or, for example, when deaf
communities read sign language or blind communities braille), I may use
“reading” on its own, with the inevitability of grammalepsis comprehended.
Once we are able to accept (grammaleptic) reading in this sense as
constitutive if not ontologically generative with regard to language, this
is when it becomes possible to appreciate more fully certain potentialities
of digitalization, certain anticipated effects on language and its arts at this
particular historical moment. We have argued that digitization changes

our modes of relationship—transaction and interaction—with the support
medium for language rather than with language itself, how and when we read
rather than what we read. What, then, happens when there is, in the domain of
digitalization, a catastrophic (no-turning-back) convergence of readabilities
in terms of grammalepsis with regard to the two distinct, if imbricated and
culturally implicated, media that support language: visuality and aurality?
At this point we must pause to consider certain relationships between
language, its support media, and the language animals that bring language
into being—ourselves. Language is something that, to the present extent of
our knowledge, only humans have.2 Our species has language. It evolved
to have language in a manner that is still imperfectly understood, although
there are particular characteristics of this evolved condition that can be
specified. There are distinct, implicated morphological traits that we have
and other animals do not. From my reading, I take the most significant of
these, apart from larger brains (which may not be as crucial as we suppose),
to be: a double-articulated oral cavity and larynx, and a spinal column
with a significantly greater diameter. In concert with Homo sapiens’ larger
brain size (and perhaps many other factors), these traits allowed us to have
language because we were suddenly, in terms of evolutionary time, able to
make a sufficient number of distinct vocal sounds—sufficient for vocabulary
and grammar commensurate with language as we know it—and because a
larger spinal column allowed nerve cells and interneurons to establish the
fine control over our lungs that was also required for articulation.3 This
happened to our species relatively recently in evolutionary time. Effectively,
we have had the potential for language baked into us very, very recently and
there are unlikely to be any foreseeable genetic changes in our species that
will significantly alter our disposition with respect to language. The point
being that we are genetically predisposed to have language as a function of
traits that operate in aurality. If we have adopted visuality as the support
medium for particular linguistic practices of what we call writing, this is
merely learned, a function of civilization.4
It is well known and much discussed that Plato considered writing to be
a pharmakon, poisonous to practices of language—particularly language
as humanly embodied praxis and cultural memory. And yet, in its other
aspect writing-as-pharmakon was rendered therapeutic by civilization.
This is, of course, a grand narrative, played out in philosophy following
and reading Plato, most particularly in the thought of Jacques Derrida and
Bernard Stiegler.5 Writing and, subsequently, literature as linguistic practice
in support of civilization were rendered therapeutic precisely because
they restructured the temporalities of language as well as enabling the
potentialities of index (random access facilitated by sublexical orders giving
more or less instant access to significant and affective textual material) and
archive. Clearly, writing allows virtual linguistic performance to survive—in
temporal extension—not only the actual performance of its makers but also
the memories of particular individuals who have read (grammaleptically)
particular linguistic performances. This temporal affordance—hypostatic
memory or hypomnesis coupled with index and archive; preserving and
conserving both language itself and these other two features—allowed
writing, ironically, to predominate as the privileged literal index of
logocentric presence and authority: history, philosophy, civilization.
Putting it far too plainly: as the course of human history and culture
proceeded, language in aurality was not able to participate as effectively
as writing—as language in persistent visuality—for the constitution and
maintenance of civil and imperial institutions. Until, that is, just about now,
at this time of writing, in the 2010s. This decade has witnessed the advent of
transactive synthetic language in aurality.6 Contemporary computation has
finally achieved robust voice recognition and acceptable speech synthesis,
all implemented over network services having access to vast corpora of
natural linguistic material with NLP affordances. Historically, I argue, this
is a turning point for our—the language animal’s—practice of language
in the world, since, for one thing, this world now also contains, crucially,
humanoid language and new entities that perform, consume, and transact
with both language as such and humanoid language.
There might arise a certain objection to my dating of the proposed
paradigmatic shift, in that synthetic (computed) language has played a part
in the history of computation since its beginnings, including, foundationally,
in the exemplary abstracted scene of writing that is the Turing Test, for which
the withholding (by, at the time, teletype) of any embodied voice is crucial
for the test, since a voice and body would simply give the game away.7 In
a sense, the advent of systems that we humans agree are able to recognize
our voices and respond with—gendered and identifiable—voices of their
own forecloses the Turing Test and marks it as having already been passed
within the duration of any acceptable initial transaction. It is the system’s
voice—recognizing and producing virtual language and doing so necessarily
instantiated in aurality—that is sufficient to establish for us human animals
that the system is specifically embodied as, at least, humanoid, and certainly
as having (or seeming to have) something that only humans have. The
historical moment for our new relationship with language had to wait for
this milestone of humanoid embodiment, in and as the voice of articulated
aurality, perhaps also as the evolved return and reincarnation of a repressed
aurality. And for the electronic literature, that we have troubled and recast
as digital language art, this turning point requires us—practitioners and
scholars—to better understand what it is that “the digital” has done for
language. It has not (yet), as we said before, established an ontologically
distinct (digital) language as such; rather, it has reconfigured the relationship
between language and its preferred substantive media of support. More
than this, it suggests that we rethink, and shift our attention to the other
culturally predominate substantive support medium for language. The digital

now, historically, forces us to rediscover the voice as articulated aurality
in an artifactual and programmable configuration that, in computationally
implemented principle, is every bit as manipulable and extensible, as subject
to index and archive, as capable of temporal restructuring, as is writing.
Transactive synthetic language is a whole new scene for the art of language
in general, and for digital language art specifically.
As we begin to shift our attention from theory of language and media
toward new practices of language art, it is important more closely to consider
what it is that I claim is happening with regard to language in aurality as
it is grammatized—subjected to algorithmically implemented processes of
grammalepsis—by contemporary computation.
Language has a singular relationship with its substantive media of
support. For V. N. Vološinov and certain of his followers, there is such
a thing as “semiotic material” and any sign—in my own terms anything
that has been read grammaleptically—becomes a token of this semiotic
material.8 Natural languages are socialized, agreed, enculturated systems
that are entirely composed of “semiotic material” in this sense. There is a
constrained permeability of substantive things that may be on their way to
becoming signs, becoming, that is, actual semiotic material. The signs and
tokens of natural languages are, on the other hand, always already signs for
the language animals that encounter and interact with them, achieving this in
a social context that necessarily involves other language animals. Compare a
particular gesture of the hand, say. A gesture may already be a sign—it might
be conventionally understood in a particular culture or it might be (always
already) a sign in a natural (sign) language—but a gesture may also be on
its way to becoming a sign, something we don’t “get,” something that needs
more work and practice, to get right, to be able to express, significantly and
affectively, whatever it hoped to express. It fails in this until it is grasped,
until it succeeds. It fails until it is read grammaleptically.
The written forms of any natural language have long ago passed beyond
this underlying scene of semiotic trauma and socialization, to the extent that
the chains of tokens of language-in-visuality (strings) enter into the domain
of purely formal semiosis—computation—in a wide variety of processes that
are, fundamentally, “lossless” ontologically. If you can write it, then you can
encode it. And, as we showed earlier, the language-as-visual-graphemes—on
paper, on screen—is ontologically identical with any language-as-digital-
encoding that underlies it. In either case, what makes the language exist as
such is its potential to be read, grammaleptically, by language animals.
If we are repeating ourselves and somewhat belaboring these concepts, this
is due to the necessity to distinguish—in the domain of aurality—between
the digitization of sound and the digitization of language-as-aurality. There is
a significant critical literature devoted to the media archaeology of recorded
sound, and this is often seen in terms of a prefiguration of digital audio
recording and transcription. In this literature, there is clear understanding

and analysis of distinctions between analog and digital recordings, with
important implications to be drawn. Nonetheless, once these have been
elaborated, there may be a misdirected tendency to believe that because
the digitization of sound encompasses and comprehends the digitization of
linguistic sound, then it has comprehended the digitization of language-as-
aurality. But this is not the case.
As set out above, the digitization of sound is constituted by encoding the
forms of a substantive medium which then require to be rendered before
they can be appreciated as such, as structured sound. You cannot hear the
encoded version. Digitized linguistic sound is no different. The encoded
version cannot be heard, much less read, grammaleptically, as language. Any
grammalepsis of digitally encoded linguistic sound can only occur during a
separate, subsequent process, after it is rendered into the world as sound. At
this point, the sound may be read and understood, by language animals, as
language-in-aurality.
In our present historical moment, the 2010s, robust automatic voice
recognition is fast gaining currency in the digitalized world, currently to
be qualified as, chiefly, the global Anglophone world. It is this facility—
automatic voice recognition—that enables the actual digitization of language-
as-aurality. Evidence that this facility was beginning to be operational dates
back to early attempts at automatic dictation/transcription systems, voice
command interpretation for personal computers, and, especially, automated
voice-activated telephone answering systems. On mobile devices, Apple’s Siri
was a breakthrough but, for our purposes, as research-based practitioners
and theorists, it is the Amazon Echo and its Alexa Voice Services (AVS) that
provide the first widespread, operational, free-standing, networked, and
programmable infrastructure, allowing us to understand, practically, the
effects and potentialities of digitized language-as-aurality.
As a point of operational fact, the Amazon Echo and AVS enact precisely the
two-stage process of digitization for language-as-aurality that we alluded to
above. Not only does this configuration of the AVS infrastructure demonstrate
that the procedures are distinct, it also signals our always insufficiently
acknowledged reliance on network services, with the asymmetric balance
of agential power and centrality that this implies. The two procedures are
separately located. I speak to an Amazon Echo. The device, locally and in “real
time,” optimizes its array of microphones to capture as digital audio a segment
of—purportedly—linguistic sound that was prefaced by one of its (currently
three) “wake” or trigger words. These wake words are the only fragments of
sound that the device itself, locally, is able to read grammaleptically as semiosis:
a command to record, until a space of relative silence is encountered. Within
the device this digitized audio is encoded as an optimized MP3 file, and it is
this digital audio data that is transmitted over the network to the cloud-based
services of AVS. “In the cloud” this digitized linguistic sound is “recognized,”
which is to say tokenized by automatic grammalepsis into, currently, word-

sized, serviceable “atoms” of machine-modeled natural language. The details
of this process are proprietary, although many aspects of the underlying
research could be set out and exposed. The pragmatic approach implied
above by “word-sized” is an educated guess. What we know as a certainty,
because the AVS cloud services supply (they “return”) transcriptions of what
the system “heard” grammaleptically as text, as potentially readable language
that is materially identical with all the digitized writing that constitutes the
most significant material of networked digital culture: the documentary
internet as we know it.
It is important to acknowledge that this service—which we are proposing
as, potentially, of momentous, paradigm-shifting cultural efficacy—does
not deliver understanding. This is not the hermeneutically enhanced
grammalepsis of reading as it is performed by fully enculturated language
animals. In the theory and practice of automatic voice recognition, this is
deferred, researched, and explored as “automatic understanding,” more
firmly in the speculative camp of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Automatic speech recognition does, however, achieve the digitization of
language-as-aurality, which means: language animals may perform in a
manner toward which they are genetically disposed and what they say is,
in principle if not yet perfectly, automatically recast in an encoded form,
subject to digital affordances, that is materially identical to text, to writing,
to all the strings of language that are now humanly readable in the realm
of computation and our increasingly predominant digitalized culture. I am
tempted, provocatively, to say (to write!) that socialized automatic speech
recognition transforms human linguistic performance into literature. Except
that I imagine that such practices, for aesthetic, significant, and affective
purposes might one day have no human need for literature as such. Its
greatest work will always already—and would not Shakespeare scholars
agree with me here?—be aurature.
Before the 1990s, language-as-graphemic-or-typographic-visuality was
already digital. (Since the very advent of writing systems, I, for one, would
argue.) Algorithm and formal procedures of many kinds had long been applied
to natural human language in this form, as writing, as literature, including
and particularly for aesthetic effect. It was the enculturation of widespread
media-agnostic digital affordances that, in the 1990s, allowed specialist
practitioners and scholars to characterize what were essentially quantitatively
and peripherally rather than qualitatively distinct reconfigurations of literary
material as, speculatively, “electronic literature.” Digital affordances allowed
practitioners and scholars to do new things with old words, to an extent that
rendered some of these new things interesting and exciting. But reading as
such did not change. Nor will it fundamentally change until the language
animal that is definitive of reading has time to evolve. What did change,
even in the 1990s, was the configuration of the scene for linguistic poiesis—
the hows and whens of reading and writing. This was and is momentous
enough, but hearing and speaking go on much as they have done, and the
predominance and momentum of reading and writing traditions were and
are minimally deflected. Even now, the most industry and energy that has
been expended on the remediation of literary practices has been applied to
artifacts that support the tradition of the book, of print-based, typographic
media—those emulators, images and mirrors of typographic artifacts that, in
English, go by the disfigured name of “ebooks.” Ebooks are with us, for the
time being and foreseeable future, but at the time of writing growth in their
popularity and dissemination has slowed. Over roughly the same period there
has been significant growth in the reading of audiobooks despite the fact that
culture predisposes these readers to an anxiety concerning whether or not
they have actually read what they are reading.9 As of 2018, the audiobook
is not digitally inscribed as language-in-aurality. It is, rather, digitized
audio with minimal digitally manipulable articulation corresponding most
commonly to the punctuation of books at the level of the chapter or subtitle.
Nonetheless, the reading of audiobooks represents a measurable shift in the
culture of reading as a whole, and this development coincides with what I
speculate will become the socialization of automatic speech recognition such
that the aurality of existing books is or will be grammatized at the level of (at
least) the word, and—to indicate merely practices that are already available
to certain readers—speech synthesizers are or will be able to present this
language-as-aurality to human readers directly, automatically. We will have
the option of reading in this newly articulated aurality.
If we can read in aurality then, as language animals and language
artists, we can compose in aurality. We can begin to make an aurature that
is formally, philosophically, ontologically identical with the literature we
have inherited, an aurature that will reconfigure and redefine the archive
without in any way sacrificing readability in general or the specific mode of
readability that has been established by literacy. The full civilizing potential
of this prospect—an aurature embodying facilities with language that are
attuned to our genetic disposition as language animals—is available to
us only due to crucial developments in digital culture and contemporary
computation. Hence, we can affirm that practices of digital language art—
especially in the reconfigured support media for language as an aesthetic
medium—at least makes sense, and may also imply, I believe, cultural and
social imperatives. Practitioners and theorists must learn and grasp those
computational affordances that will allow them, fully, to participate in, to
guide, and to enhance cultural and social developments that will otherwise
proceed without their contributions, and risk downplaying aesthetic
practice at the expense of what are supposed to be more substantive and
instrumentally secure benefits. What we do not want is to remain the
electronically literate writers of a history in which we find ourselves at the
end of all literature, with no viable media for the art of language.
NOTES
Introduction
1 I will not necessarily note my references in this introduction—strategically,
trusting the reader to discover my more scholarly allusions in the chapters
themselves—unless my references are not cited elsewhere in the book.
2 I am concerned with linguistic ontology, in outlining this concept of
grammalepsy, but I concentrate—in a manner consonant with a practitioner’s
inclinations—on the production and reproduction of language rather than on
what language is, in its fullness. Grammalepsy is, however, constituted by and
characteristic of reading by humans. As I say below, symbolic parsing is not
grammalepsis. And I agree with philosophers like Charles Taylor who ascribe
to what Taylor calls a “constitutive” theory of language rather than those
“designative” theories that are predominant, and particularly influential within
the “regime of computation,” where linguistic practice may be considered
reducible to calculation. The contrasting “constitutive” view proposes that
language allows us to become more than whatever we were before we “have”
it. Grammalepsy simply characterizes those moments when this takes place.
See, in particular, the first chapter, “Designative and Constitutive Views,” in
The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016).
3 This is, perhaps, the place to mention that, outside the scope of this selection
but in another not unrelated thread of discourse, I have written on related
problems of translation and, in particular, the translation of process. John
Cayley, “Digital wen: On the Digitization of Letter- and Character-Based
Systems of Inscription,” in Reading East Asian Writing: The Limits of Literary
Theory, ed. Michel Hockx and Ivo Smits, RoutledgeCurzon-IIAS Asian
Studies Series (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003); “Beginning with ‘the Image’
in How It Is When Translating Certain Processes of Digital Language Art,”
Electronic Book Review (2015); “Untranslatability and Readability,” Critical
Multilingualism Studies 3, no. 1 (2015); “The Translation of Process,” Amodern,
no. 8 (2018).
4 See: Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word
Processing (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016).
5 Andrew Michael Roberts, “Why Digital Literature Has Always Been ‘Beyond
the Screen’,” in Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures,
Interfaces and Genres, ed. Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer, Media Upheavals
(Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010), 162.
222 NOTES
6 See, for example, Ivan Illich’s discussion of the gaze and the icon, summing up
the theories of John of Damascus (675–749), “an icon is a threshold. It is a
threshold at which the artist prayerfully leaves some inkling of the glory that he
has seen behind that threshold.” The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament
of Ivan Illich as Told to David Cayley (Toronto: Anansi, 2005), 114. I adapted
this language for John Cayley, Lens, 2004.
7 See “At the End of Literature.”
8 John Cayley, “Of Capta, Vectoralists, Reading and the Googlization of
Universities,” in Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on
Politics, Culture, Aesthetics, and Literacy, ed. Roberto Simanowski (London:
Open Humanities Press, 2016).
Chapter 1
1 These opening remarks, lightly edited, were composed for the republication of
the 1996 essay in 2007.
2 I retain “literary” here in parentheses in deference to a persistent investment in
“superior or lasting artistic merit” (Oxford English Dictionary), whereas serious
contemporary critics of language practice in networked and programmable
media may question the relevance of any “literary” categorizations. See, in
particular, Sandy Baldwin, The Internet Unconscious: On the Subject of
Electronic Literature, International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics (New
York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). In my more recent thinking, I bring the
category into question for reasons of misdirected media specificity—because the
affordances of digitalization undermine the predominance and privilege of the
“letter” as what it is that we say we read. See, in this volume, “At the End of
Literature.”
3 “Serious hypertext” is a rubric of Boston’s Eastgate Systems, one of the major,
self-consciously literary publishers in the field, and developers of their own
hypertext authoring software, “StorySpace.” The Voyager Company has also
made significant efforts to produce new work in new media as well as transpose
appropriate content.
4 George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical
Theory and Technology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1992). Landow published two further editions of this relatively popular
and influential work for which he evoked the “versioning” paradigm of software
and the regime of computation rather than that of the literary edition itself.
Hypertext 2.0 came out in 1997 and 3.0 in 2006. Jay David Bolter, Writing
Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, 1991); George P. Landow, ed. Hyper/Text/Theory (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1994); Michael Joyce, Of Two Minds: Hypertext
Peda-gogy and Poetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
And still of particular importance and relevance: Espen Aarseth, Cybertext:
Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997).
NOTES 223
5 Posting, March 28, 1995, to the early internet discussion list, ht_lit. In 1995
this list had migrated to a server at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada, journal.biology.carleton.ca, and was moderated by K. M. Mennie.
The list and its archive have been offline for some years but in 2017 I made
contact with K. M. Mennie and initiated a plan to make an intrinsically
searchable plain text archive of the discussions available in the Brown
University Library’s Brown Digital Repository at: https://repository.library.
brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:735315/.
6 If only society and language use would agree with me, I would still now prefer
to use the term “programmaton” for most uses of “computer.”
7 Generalized non-linear poetics is one of the central concerns of the pioneering
hypertext poet, Jim Rosenberg. See, for example, his introductory essay in Jim
Rosenberg, Intergrams (Cambridge, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1993). This was
published as part of The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext, Vol. 1, No.
1. Rosenberg also posted a draft discussion of these issues to the listerv ht_lit
(see note 5), March 26, 1995. Espen Aarseth has placed hypertext within a
broader theoretical framework. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic
Literature (See also note 5).
8 The Chinese writing system, in which characters correspond with single
syllables, encourages the composition of associated periods with equal
phonetic and graphic length, the elements of which may also correspond
in terms of semantics and grammar. This is known as “parallelism” and, by
definition and form, promotes non-linear reading. The figure is particularly
marked in literary Chinese, especially classical poetry, where it may be
required for certain verse forms.
9 Potential Literary Outlawry or PoLiOu was, potentially, one name for a
broad range of experimental literary activities which are engaged with
their own representation in cyberspace and with the particular capabilities
offered by this new form of representation. Clearly, the name makes explicit
acknowledgement to both the anticipatory plagiarisms and the anticipated
antagonisms of the OuLiPo (See also note 28).
10 John Cayley, Wine Flying (London: Wellsweep, 1988). wine flying was first
programmed on a BBC microcomputer in 1983–84. In 1988, it was ported to
the Apple Macintosh and HyperCard and HyperTalk, the author’s preferred
development environment for this kind of work at the time.
11 The authoring framework referred to here, implemented in HyperCard and
HyperTalk, was never published, although it was used for individual works
such as wine flying. This points to the question of the cybertextual author’s
engagement in the creation of forms themselves and how this relates to the
completed work. Most of the software forms I have made are intimately
related to the corresponding finished works, but at the time of writing I could
see clearly that—particularly in the case of non-generative work such as
Scoring the Spelt Air—form could easily be detached from any specific content
and rendered as instrument, tool, or compositional device.
12 The writer of the letter was Humphrey McFall, who it is a pleasure to
acknowledge.
13 “Lexia” is a term adopted by George Landow from Roland Barthes to indicate
the unit of text at either end of a hypertext link.
224 NOTES
14 “I am on record as advocating taking hypertext into the fine structure of

language, thereby fragmenting the lexia …,” “Notes toward a non-linear
prosody of space,” Jim Rosenberg, posting to the ht_lit discussion list (see note
5), March 26, 1995; or in a later posting elsewhere, “my own interest [is] in
using hypertext to carry the infrastructure of language itself …” October 28,
1995. And see also: Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature
(See also note 5).
15 John Cayley, Indra’s Net I (London: Wellsweep, 1991–93). Details of the
other publications in the series will be given as they are mentioned. All were
HyperCard 2.x “stacks,” published on disk or over the internet, for pre-OS X
Macintosh computers only.
16 Kenneth Ch’en, Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey, 1st paperback ed.
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 317.
17 “But the fact that the mind itself has no internal necessity to determine its every
act and compel it to suffer in helpless passivity—this is due to the slight swerve
of the atoms at no determinate time or place.” Lucretius, The Nature of the
Universe, trans. R. E. Latham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), Book 2, 68. The
swerve or “clinamen” of Lucretius is also a major reference point for the OuLiPo
(see note 28), even though the workshop is, generally, suspicious of the aleatory.
18 See, especially, Emmett Williams, A Valentine for Noël: Four Variations on
a Scheme (Stuttgart and London: Editions Hanjörg Mayer, 1973); Selected
Shorter Poems 1950–1970 (New York: New Directions, 1975). A selection
of Jackson Mac Low’s “Asymmetries” is included in: Jackson Mac Low,
Representative Works: 1938–1985 (New York: Roof Books, 1986). His
“diastic” technique was used in: The Virginia Woolf Poems (Providence,
RI: Burning Deck, 1985). See also note 21. Cage used mesostic techniques
to compose Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), having
already “written through” Joyce’s work in 1978: John Cage and James
Joyce, Writing through Finnegans Wake, University of Tulsa Monograph
Series (Tulsa: University of Tulsa, 1978). They are also exemplified in John
Cage, I-VI, The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1990). There is, especially in chapters 5 and 7, interesting
discussion of these works in: Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry
in the Age of Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). For a
more comprehensive treatment of these and other precursors in the field of
innovative poetics, refer to: Loss Pequeño Glazier, Digital Poetics: The Making
of E-Poetries (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002).
19 It would be interesting to make a catalogue of the precise varieties of
generative acrostic and mesostic procedures, noting their differences, although
this is far beyond our scope here.
20 This technique bears certain similarities to those developed by: Stefan
Themerson, On Semantic Poetry (London: Gaberbocchus Press, 1975). Further
details of a number of other potential and—in Indra’s Net—as-yet-unrealized
forms can be found in the explanatory material which is introductory to
the pieces in Indra’s Net I–III. These include further etymological and
glossological hologograms, phonemic hologograms (these would generate a
form of sound poetry), and morphemic hologograms (which I will eventually
explore since they would provide a way of engaging a language like Chinese).
NOTES 225
A commission for an installation at the Midland Arts Centre, Birmingham,

that I received in 1996 allowed me to investigate mesostic transformations
from original Irish to English translation (in another alphabetic script) and
back again. The software was later published in the Indra’s Net series as John
Cayley, Oisleánd: Indra’s Net IX (London: Wellsweep, 1996). See note 37.
21 This twenty-six-word form is similar to Williams’s “ultimate poetry” except
that in my strict form I try to make a twenty-six-word sentence or narrative
(in the traditional order of the letters). An aspect of this form which I cannot
resist mentioning is that once—like Williams, Mac Low, or myself—you have
mapped the twenty-six letters of the alphabet onto twenty-six words, it is
theoretically possible to encode all of literature acrostically or mesostically—
translating everything into a “surface language” of twenty-six meaning-tokens
(with no loss of information). Perhaps alphabetization was once perceived like
this, as early scribes moved from away from morphemic script elements—as if
“book” seemed to present itself as: “house + eye + eye + palm-of-the-hand.”
22 Oscar Pastior in his Poempoems (first German publication 1973) has a more
poetic and less formalist approach to a similar self-referentiality: “holography
… to make a text as far as possible such that every part contains the whole.
That is an image I hold in front of me.” Oskar Pastior, Poempoems, Printed
Head (London: Atlas Press, 1991). See also: Many Glove Compartments:
Selected Poems, trans. Harry Mathews, Christopher Middleton, and Rosemarie
Waldrop (Providence, RI: Burning Deck, 2001). Eduardo Kac is another early
explorer of the application of holography to literature and vice versa. See his
first “holopoem” (with Fernando Catta-Preta), HOLO/OLHO (1983), and
his remarks in “Holopoetry and Fractal Holopoetry,”Holo/Olho (Holo/Eye)
… is a combination of anagrams in which the word holo mirrors olho and
vice-versa. The mirroring effect, however, was conceived so that fragments of
the poem would contain enough letters to form the entire meaning: both holo
and eye. The arrangement of letters in space was holographed five times; each
hologram was fragmented and the five holograms were reassembled in a new
visual unit. This holopoem was an attempt to recreate, in its own syntax, a
structure that would correspond to the holographic model, according to which
the information of the whole is contained in the part and vice-versa.
Eduardo Kac, “Holopoetry and Fractal Holopoetry,” Leonardo 22, no. 3 & 4
(1989): 399.
23 John Cayley, Collocations: Indra’s Net II (London: Wellsweep, 1993).
24 An Essay on the Golden Lion: Han-Shan in Indra’s Net (Edinburgh: Morning
Star, 1995). See the discussion of Golden Lion below.
25 Under It All: Texts, Hologography, Afterword (London: The Many Press,
1993). This little book was published in an edition of 221 copies, each of
which was unique. Four separately prepared pages bound into each copy
consist of unique samples from two hologographic transformations.
26 As of this publication, I still have plans for an installation to project words
onto mesostic planes, realized as a set of twenty-six transparent screens or
planes arranged so as to suggest a large cubic word space. Read from its
“front” through all of the twenty-six layers, fragments of a given text would
be legible as the text was generated and projected words onto the planes. But
moving around the cube, other mesostically determined orders of words would
present themselves.
226 NOTES
27 Here, a line of similar and in some respects, parallel work (which did not
directly influence my own at the time) runs from the text-generation program
“Travesty” by Joseph O’Rourke and Hugh Kenner, intersecting with Mac
Low at the point of his Merzgedichte. Hugh Kenner and Joseph O’Rourke,
“A Travesty Generator for Micros,” Byte, November 1984; Jackson Mac Low
and Kurt Schwitters, 42 Merzgedichte in Memoriam Kurt Schwitters: February
1987–September 1989, 1st ed. (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1994). During
the composition of his Merzgedichte in the late 1980s, Charles O. Hartman
sent Mac Low several computer programs including “Diatext” and “Diatex4.”
He also started to make use of Hugh Kenner and Joseph O’Rourke’s “pseudo-
text-generating” program “Travesty” at about this time, to create some of
the poems. However, “All outputs were subject to rule-guided editing” (sleeve
notes for the audio CD, Open Secrets (New York: XI, Experimental Intermedia
Foundation, n.d. [1994])). Most recently, such processes have been used in:
Charles O. Hartman and Hugh Kenner, Sentences, 1st pbk. ed., New American
Poetry Series (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995). “Travesty” is a text
processor which, set to its higher “orders,” will produce results similar to those
of my collocational procedures.
28 Mathews, a member of the OuLiPo, outlines his version of the procedure in:
Harry Mathews, 20 Lines a Day, 1st pbk. ed. (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive
Press, 1989). The OuLiPo, or Ouvroir de Littérature Potentiel, is clearly a
basic reference point for cybertextual developments given the workshop’s
profound and ludic investigations of the relationship between mathematics
and literature, constrictive form, combinatory literature, etc. See, by way
of introduction: Warren F. Motte, Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); Harry Mathews and Alastair
Brotchie, eds., Oulipo Compendium (London: Atlas Press, 1998). However,
the OuLiPo has, at best, an ambiguous attitude to the aleatory as an aspect
of generational, constrictive or combinatory procedure, despite the fact that
the distinction between choice as chance and the choice of arbitrary formal
constraints may be too nice to rule out the potential of one or the other.
29 John Cayley, Moods & Conjunctions: Indra’s Net III (London: Wellsweep,
1993–94).
30 Golden Lion: Indra’s Net IV (London: Wellsweep, 1994).
31 John Cayley and Gu Cheng, Leaving the City: Indra’s Net V (London:
Wellsweep, 1995).
32 William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Exterminator (San Francisco:
Auerhahn Press, 1960); Sinclair Beiles et al., Minutes to Go (Paris: Jean
Fanchette, 1960).
33 John Cayley, Book Unbound: Indra’s Net VI (London: Wellsweep, 1995).
Book Unbound has also been anthologized in a number of places, as follows:
Cayley, John. “Book Unbound,” Engaged, 1995, On CD-ROM; Cayley, John.
“Book Unbound,” Postmodern Culture 7, no. 3, Hypertext special issue
(February 1997). http://muse.jhu.edu/article/603711 (accessed August 13,
2017); “Book Unbound,” in Dietsche Warande & Beaufort [Dwb], 4, on
Electronic (Visual) Literarture, ed. Eric Vos and Jan Baetens (1999); “Book
Unbound,” in The New Media Reader, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick
Montfort (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
NOTES 227
34 The Speaking Clock: Indra’s Net VII (London: Wellsweep, 1995). Extracts
from the clock were also published as: Cayley, John. “From: The Speaking
Clock,” Chain 4 (1997): 25–27.
35 To quote from the given text: “Real time is concealed beneath the cyclical
behavior of clock and time piece. No moment is like any other … and yet the
clock applies the same ‘name’ to many a different instance.” The Speaking
Clock affects to give a unique name to every moment.
36 See Jhave’s website, http://glia.ca and David Jhave Johnston, Aesthetic
Animism: Digital Poetry’s Ontological Implications (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2016).
37 Oisleánd, as a HyperCard stack, can be still be download from http://
programmatology.shadoof.net and can also be viewed in a constrained,
early web version on this site, http://programmatology.shadoof.net/works/oi/
oisleand.html. This piece was commissioned for a touring exhibition, “Words
Revealed,” initially at the Midland Arts Centre, UK, May 11 to June 23,
1996. windsound has been performed and shown as a text movie in various
venues and is also downloadable as a video from the “programmatology”
site. Cayley, Oisleánd: Indra’s Net IX; windsound, 1999; windsound, 2003.
Electronic Literature Organization: State of the Arts: The Proceedings of the
Electronic Literature Organization’s 2002 State of the Arts Symposium &
2001 Electronic Literature Awards, included on the CD-ROM.
38 A severely cut-back, early versions of noth’rs appeared on the CD-ROM which
accompanied an issue of Performance Research edited by Ric Allsopp and
Scott deLahunta. noth’rs, 1999. Performance Research: 4.2, on CD-ROM. It
was also published on the web as noth’rs, 1999a. Riding the Meridian. An
initial performance version was shown at the Digital Arts and Culture (DAC)
conference, Atlanta Georgia, October 28–31, 1999.
39 I owe this characterization in part to Espen Aarseth, who has developed a
(media independent) “generalized model with a few broad categories that can
describe the main differences of textual phenomena.” In his excellent book
already cited, Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. He
argues convincingly for a distinction between cybertext and hypertext, putting
forward the former as an inclusive term embracing, for example, indeterminate
or reader-constructed texts, and reserving hypertext for (passively) linked
structures of static lexia (textual nodes).
Chapter 2
1 Sections “THESIS,” “ANTITHESIS,” and “SYNTHESIS” of this chapter were
software-generated by applying semi-aleatory collocational procedures to
arguments manually edited out from the earlier sections. The two arguments
might be summarized as: “The COMPUTER is (an integral part of) the
SYSTEM against which WE write” (thesis), and “Software sHifts poetIcs, iF
riTers prEss: <Reveal>” (antithesis). Sections “THESIS” and “ANTITHESIS”
were generated from their respective arguments separately. A collocational
algorithm generated phrases which were selected and collected by the author.
228 NOTES
Selected phrases were also fed back into the given texts, changing them
irreversibly. The altered texts from “THESIS” and “ANTITHESIS” were then
combined and used as the given text for section “SYNTHESIS” (synthesis). Note
that by this stage very little active selection of generated phrases was required
by the author. The final paragraphs of section “SYNTHESIS” are almost entirely
generated by the simple collocational algorithm. I merely split the generated
paragraphs into lines.
A HyperCard stack (Macintosh only, for HyperCard 2.x) with “Reveal
Code” cybertext generator was produced and published as John Cayley,
Pressing the <Reveal Code> Key: Indra’s Net VIII (London: Wellsweep, 1996).
An archive of this stack is still downloadable, without warranty, from http://
programmatology.shadoof/net.
Section “<REVEALED>” is an extract of the actual working code
(in HyperTalk) used to generate sections “THESIS,” “ANTITHESIS” and
“SYNTHESIS.” The variable terms have been randomly and systematically
replaced with substantive words from sections “The COMPUTER is (an integral
part of) the SYSTEM against which WE write,” “INVARIANT inACCURATE
SYSTEMS never sleep SYNCHRONICally,” “The COMPUTER is not (a
part of) THE MEDIA. The COMPUTER allows for the COMPOSITION
of an indeterminate number of potential MEDIA,” “FAMILIARITY breeds
CONTEMPT. INTIMACY inspires MYSTIFICATION” and “Software sHifts
poetIcs, iF riTers prEss: <Reveal>”—any noun or adjective is allowed to replace
a variable name containing a value; any verb is allowed to replace a procedure
or function name. HyperTalk “reserved words” have been left intact. The code is
working code.
2 Perloff, 189.
3 Ibid.
4 Charles Bernstein, “Play It Again, Pac-Man,” Postmodern Culture 2, no. 1
(1991: n.p.). Cited by Perloff (perhaps in an earlier form) as: “Hot Circuits: A
Video Arcade,” American Museum of the Moving Image, June 14–November
26, 1989.
5 Perloff, 188.
6 Perloff mentions this: ibid., 208. However, Rosenberg has since pointed out that
he wrote only the early programs. Andrew Culver then took over this work for
Cage. (Personal communication.)
7 Jim Rosenberg, remarks posted to the internet discussion list ht_lit, June 9,
1995. See “Beyond Codexspace” note 5 above.
Chapter 3
1 Bolter; Gregory L. Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(E)-Pedagogy from
Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1985); Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1994).
2 Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.
NOTES 229
3 Theodor Holm Nelson, Computer Lib / Dream Machines, Revised and updated
ed. (Redmond: Tempus Books of Microsoft Press, 1987); Literary Machines
93.1 (Sausalito: Mindful Press, 1993).
4 When this text was first published, the poet, cris cheek [sic], provided a brief
list of poetics “must-reads” for new media artists. I will provide his excellent
references here, in this note. Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School (New
York: Grove Press, 1978); Steve Benson, Blue Book (Great Barrington: The
Figures/Roof, 1988); Brian Catling, The Stumbling Block (London: Book Works,
1990); Cayley, Book Unbound: Indra’s Net VI; Allen Fisher, Defamiliarising
___________ * (London: Veer Books, 2013); Robert Grenier, Sentences, 1st ed.
(Cambridge: Whale Cloth Press, 1978); Mac Low, Representative Works: 1938–
1985; Steve McCaffery, Panopticon, 1st ed. (Toronto: blewointmentpress, 1984);
Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery, eds., Imagining Language: An Anthology
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Tom Raworth, Logbook (Berkeley, CA:
Poltroon Press, 1977); Writing: [Poems] (Berkeley, CA: Figures, 1982); Lisa
Robertson, Debbie: An Epic (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1997); Jerome
Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, eds., Poems for the Millennium: The University of
California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Vol. 2: From Postwar to
Millennium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Fiona Templeton,
You the City (New York: Roof Books, 1990); Hannah Weiner, Spoke (Los
Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1984).
5 “Whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the
cybernetic program will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is
by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts-including the concepts of soul, of
life, of value, of choice, of memory-which until recently served to separate
the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, grammè
[written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is
also exposed.” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, Corrected ed. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1997), 9.
Chapter 4
1 Certain terms in this essay may require explanation. I prefer, despite its
awkwardness and length, “writing in networked and programmable
media” to any of the current words or phrases such as “hypertext,
hyperfiction, hyperpoetry,” or the corresponding “cyber-” terms, although
I do generally subscribe to Espen Aarseth’s “textonomy,” and would prefer
cybertext to hypertext as the more inclusive, “catholic” term. Aarseth,
Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. I use “programmatology”
and “programmatological” by extension from “grammatology” and
especially “applied grammatology” as elaborated by Gregory Ulmer. Ulmer.
Programmatology may be thought of as the study and practice of writing
(Derridean sense) with an explicit awareness of its relation to “programming”
or prior writing in anticipation of performance, including the performance of
reading. I try to avoid the use of words such as “computer” and prefer, wherever
230 NOTES
possible, “programmaton” for the programmable systems which we use to

compose and deliver “new media.”
2 This essay was originally sketched out for the “p0es1s: Poetics of digital text”
symposion [sic], held in Erfurt, September 28–29, 2001.
3 Friedrich A. Kittler, “There Is No Software,” in Literature Media Information
Systems, ed. John Johnston, Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture
(Amsteldijk: G+B Arts International, 1997), 150.
4 There are times when I would like to write “code-as-text” and other times,
“text-as-code,” occasionally with either term cycling (e.g., code-as-text-as-
code) I will just use the one term, asking the reader to bear in mind the other
possibilities in appropriate contexts.
5 As an example of the prevalence of code-as-text across the widest range of
artistic inscription, a version of the code-as-text or reveal code aesthetic appears
as something of a culmination in Lev Manovich’s excellent and provocative
The Language of New Media (not discussed in the body of the present chapter
because of my focus on textual and literal art practice). The final section of
Manovich’s book is entitled “Cinema as Code” and features Vuk Cosic’s ASCII
films, “which effectively stage one characteristic of computer-based moving
images—their identity as computer code.” Manovich is undoubtedly correct
when he asserts that, “What [George] Lucas hides, Cosic reveals. His ASCII
films ‘perform’ the new status of media as digital data … Thus, rather than
erasing the image in favor of the code … or hiding the code from us … code and
image coexist.” Nonetheless, it is worrying to be presented, in this highlighted
context, with the example of work whose aesthetic may well prove to be
exhausted by a conceptual and metacritical analysis (see below), particularly
in a book which makes an unprecedented contribution to our understanding
of new and emergent rhetorical strategies in new media (especially the crucial
role of cinematic rhetoric), and represents a deep understanding of new media’s
programmatological dimension. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 330–333.
6 N. Katherine Hayles, “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” in How We
Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 29. An earlier version of this essay
is also published as: “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” in Electronic
Culture: Technology and Visual Representation, ed. Timothy Druckrey (New
York: Aperture, 1996).
7 “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” 26.
8 “William Gibson (1948–),” The Guardian, July 22, 2008; Michael Cunningham,
“The Virtual Tourist [a Short Interview with William Gibson],” The Irish Times,
October 12, 1996.
In real life, Gibson is actually the opposite of hi-tech. He maintains a high
degree of goofy aloofness from the technologies he writes about in such
obsessive detail—almost as if just using them would increase the risk of
being somehow “infected” by them. He wrote his most famous novel,
Neuromancer, on a 1927 olive-green Hermes portable typewriter, and only
recently migrated to a battered old Apple Mac.
NOTES 231
Gibson famously discussed his use of a typewriter in a phone interview for

Playboy, August 30, 1996. “I do remember sitting with a blank sheet of paper
and a typewriter going to ‘dataspace’ and ‘infospace’ and a couple of other
clunkers, and then coming to ‘cyberspace’ thinking it sounds as though it
means something.” I have touched on the question of Gibson’s and another
influential contemporary novelist’s apparently conservative approach to, shall
we say, avant-garde practice in a relatively early online work, John Cayley,
“Why Did People Make Things Like This?” Electronic Book Review (1997).
9 Hayles, “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” 31. The immediately
following quotations, interspersed with my comments, are from what I take to
be a crucial paragraph in Hayles’s crucial article.
10 I mean “power” as used in the advertising and publicity for computer systems
where, to relate the term with a more general or Foucauldian sense, we may
think of it as the power to alter the behavior of a system (in an impressive
manner or at great speed, etc.). See below.
11 Florian Cramer, “Digital Code and Literary Text,” BeeHive Hypertext/
Hypermedia Literary Journal 4, no. 3 (2001). Also available through one of
Cramer’s websites at: http://www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/digital_code_and_
literary_text.html (accessed July 31, 2017).
12 In passing it is worth highlighting the interface itself, particularly the ever-
evolving HCI, as a complex programmable object with a structure like a
language, including, in some cases, an underlying textual command-line
interface which mirrors the now-familiar mimetic and visual instantiation of
users’ interface. This is another point for potential artistic intervention as well
as a vital consideration when discussing the emergent rhetorics of new media,
as Manovich has demonstrated so well, even introducing the powerful concept
of “cultural interface” (human-computer-culture interface) as an analytic tool.
Manovich, 62–115.
13 Cramer.
14 Perloff, 189. For a separate but related discussion of some of these issues, see
“Pressing the ‘REVEAL CODE’ Key” in this volume. The work of Emmett
Williams and Jackson Mac Low, central to any assessment of the radical poetic
artifice which she identifies, as also for the criticism of writing in networked
and programmable media, is notable for its absence from Perloff’s book.
15 Ibid., 188.
16 As more writers from this tradition make the move into “new media,” this
position begins to change. They become “new media writers” “digital poets,”
and so on and attitudes perceptibly shift. Writers also, of course, become
more sophisticated in their understanding of programmatological systems.
This can be seen particularly in Charles Bernstein’s subsequent writing on
digital media and also, for example, in the work of Loss Pequeño Glazier, who
is closely associated with the poetic practice which has developed from the
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E “school.” See below, and: Glazier.
17 The critical history of this (anti-)tradition in poetic literature is generally
traced at least back to Mallarmé. A convenient source for its study can be
found in the two-volume anthology: Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris,
eds., Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern
232 NOTES
and Postmodern Poetry, Vol. 1: From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1995); Poems for the Millennium: The
University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Vol. 2.
18 The term is (ironic) OuLiPian, used of any prior instantiation of work
generated by a procedure which has subsequently been invented and specified
by the OuLiPo. Such a discussion is beyond the scope of this essay.
19 See: Manovich, 94–115.
20 The argument here is a rehearsal of the familiar but ever-important argument
against art practice, particularly new media art practice, as media-specific or
media-determined. Cramer’s essay makes similar points.
21 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1990); N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies
in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999), 46.
22 Although I do not make use of his analysis in this essay, it is well-worth
referring to Philippe Bootz’s analysis of systems-mediated textuality, where
I believe my “interface text” roughly corresponds to his “texte-à-voir.” See:
Philippe Bootz, “Le Point de Vue Fonctionnel: Point de Vue Tragique et
Programme Pilote,” alire 10 / DOC(K)S Series 3, no. 13/14/15/16 (1997).
23 N. Katherine Hayles, “Bodies of Texts, Bodies of Subjects: Metaphoric
Networks in New Media” (paper presented at the Digital Arts and Culture
conference, Providence, RI, 2001). This is cited from the version of the paper
posted in PDF form before the conference.
24 Not “(yet)” as I say, although some might wish to try and make the strong
case for an emergent machinic culture, which is, I believe, a serious project
although a misdirection in this context.
25 As in the term “Chinese Pidgin English.” Cf., for example, the discussion in:
Charles F. Hockett, A Course in Modern Linguistics (New York: Macmillan,
1958).
26 Not exhausted in the examples given, as I say, but these remarks are, indeed,
offered as a partial explanation of what is wanting in much less-considered
and less well-made writing in networked and programmable media, where
inadequate and inadequately theorized form substitutes for and sometimes
positively evades content; when the writing is like poems about poetry (and
nothing else), or techno-writing about technology.
27 Alan Sondheim, Jennifer (Salt Lake City: Nominative Press Collective, 1998).
28 That is, it needs to be judged as such and should not necessarily be granted a
special credit of affect or significance because of its instantiation in new media.
29 Most recently in the book gathering many of these papers and essays, Digital
Poetics, which, please note, includes a chapter devoted to “Coding Writing,
Reading Code.” Glazier’s work has been done while he has also served as one
of the motive forces and prime initiators of the major resource for innovative
writing on the internet, the Electronic Poetry Center at the University of
Buffalo, http://epc.buffalo.edu. Glazier.
30 Ibid., 31–32.
31 See: “White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares,” Electronic Poetry Center,
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/glazier/java/costa1/00.html. This work
illustrates my specific points and also demonstrates that Glazier has been
exploring the properly programmatological dimension of writing in networked
NOTES 233
and programmable media with, for example, kinetic and algorithmic texts.
A classified selection of texts is at: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier/e-
poetry/.
32 Jodi is the very well-known, long-standing net.art project of Joan Heemskerk
and Dirk Paesmans. Jodi, www.jodi.org, 1980. Jodi.
33 The practice of composing ASCII symbols, usually displayed as monospaced
fonts for regularity, in order to generate imagery. In Jodi’s case this was
abstract or verging on the abstract whereas, popularly, ASCII art has been
figurative.
34 See “Pressing the ‘REVEAL CODE’ Key” in this volume. The variable terms in
this code were randomly and systematically replaced with substantive words
from the text on which the procedure operates—any noun or adjective was
allowed to replace a variable name containing a value; any verb replaced a
procedure or function name. HyperTalk “reserved words” were left intact. The
code is working code.
35 But I raise it, in part, thanks to remarks by Nick Montfort which are
published along with: John Cayley, “Literal Art: Neither Lines nor Pixels but
Letters,” in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, ed.
Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004);
“Literal Art: Neither Lines nor Pixels but Letters,” Electronic Book Review
electropoetics (2004). As I was writing I came across Hugh Kenner’s highly
interesting reading of “Beckett Thinking.” Kenner examines Beckett’s writing
in terms of strict, exhaustive logical procedure in an essay which includes
paraphrases coded in the programming language Pascal. Hugh Kenner, The
Mechanic Muse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 85–105.
36 Hayles, “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” 33.
Chapter 5
1 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstader and ed.
Harper Colophon (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 115. In its web-based
form (http://programmatology.shadoof.net/works/hypercyberpoetext/hcp000.
html) and also as printed in Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern
Poetries Transnationally, there is a parallel “X” text based on an edited
sequence from the same Heidegger piece, extracted from pp. 111 to 120.
This text was collocationally transformed, using a procedure I have described
elsewhere:
This transformation can proceed beginning with any word in the given
text, which we then may call ‘the word last chosen.’ Any other word—
occurring at any point in the base text—which follows (collocates with) the
word last chosen may then follow it and so become in turn the word last
chosen. // Clearly, in this type of transformation, at the very least, each pair
of successive words are two-word segments of natural English. However,
the text will wander within itself, branching at any point where a word that
is repeated in the base text is chosen, and this will most often occur when
common, grammatical words are encountered.
234 NOTES
(“Beyond Codexspace,” above, p. 25) In addition, words at the end of

collocational jumps were, where possible, chosen to spell out the mesostic
message (in bold) “what are poets for: technology calculation numbers.” This
text is one possible rendition of a quasi-aleatory procedure which produces
indeterminate results. It was not edited. Heidegger’s text is cited and subverted
as, in this context, what tends to interpretation as an arch-conservative
counter-current, one apotheosis of a perspective on “writing” which claims
that, to come into being, it must transcend (even) its (traditional) technologies
(see 2), and (the troubling, distasteful horizon of) technology itself.
2 See also the discussion of related issues in “Pressing the ‘REVEAL CODE’
Key” in this volume.
3 “Beyond Codexspace,” above, p. 18.
4 “Pressing the ‘REVEAL CODE’ Key,” above, p. 36.
5 Bolter; Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical
Theory and Technology; Hyper/Text/Theory; Joyce, Of Two Minds: Hypertext
Peda-gogy and Poetics.
6 Perhaps it would be clearer to use Barthes’s original terms, since the standard
translation of scriptible, “writerly,” must also be understood as “reader-
centered.” Barthes, S/Z, 3–6.
7 “Intelligence is relentlessly reflexive, so that even the external tools that it
uses to implement its workings become ‘internalized’, that is, part of its own
reflexive process.” Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of
the Word, ed. Terence Hawkes, New Accents (London: Routledge, 1982; repr.,
1995), 78 ff., 81.
8 See, in particular, Jim Rosenberg’s introductory essay to: Rosenberg,
Intergrams. He has also posted a draft discussion of these issues to the ht_lit
discussion list, March 26, 1995. See “Beyond Codexspace,” chapter 1, note 5
above. See also the discussions of non-linearity in this chapter’s note 5.
9 Espen Aarseth has discussed a “cyborg aesthetics” of literature in: Aarseth,
Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, 51 ff.
10 See “Pressing the ‘REVEAL CODE’ Key,” above, p. 36. I pursue the programmer/
writer relation briefly in “Of Programmatology,” also in this volume.
11 For 22–23, I must acknowledge both the discussion of a “logic of [formal]
exemplification” derived from Cage, in a paper presented at the “Assembling
Alternatives” conference by Tyrus Miller “Paragram as participation:
Anarchist poetics in John Cage and Jackson Mac Low,” and especially
Joan Retallack’s challenge to this suggestion, namely her preference for the
“experience of a possible form of life” in questions afterward.
12 Aarseth has developed this in a number of places: Espen Aarseth,
“Nonlinearity and Literary Theory,” in Hyper/Text/Theory, ed. George P.
Landow (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); “Text, Hypertext
or Cybertext: A Typology of Textual Modes Using Correspondence Analysis,”
in Research in Humanities Computing, 5, ed. Giorgio Perissinotto, Susan
Hockey, and Nancy Ide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Cybertext:
Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.
13 MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) and MOOs (MUD Object Orientated) are
recast by Aarseth as Multi-User Discourses. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives
on Ergodic Literature, 142 ff. They represent what is perhaps the most radical
form of textuality currently implemented beyond codexspace. Despite their
NOTES 235
origins in game playing, these textual spaces require just the sort of analysis
which Aarseth has pioneered, an analysis capable of treating them as “potential
literature.” As a practical experiment, hypertext researchers at Brown University
famously established “Hypertext Hotel,” a MOO space with explicitly literary
inclinations (https://elmcip.net/node/360, accessed July 31, 2017).
14 Ibid., 179. Much as it concerns many of the questions raised, it is impossible
to discuss ergodic art further within the scope of this chapter. It is an analytical
concept well worth pursuing.
15 In her contribution to Assembling Alternatives, “In the Place of Writing,”
Caroline Bergvall has made a strong case for “performance” as a model
of practice bringing together innovative poetic engagements and cross-art
experiments which invoke “non-literary” media or sites—contexts “contained
by and specifying the intertextual” [Bergvall’s emphasis]. Performance is
an intertextual (or hypertextual) path out of codexspace into anyspace.
Performance (“to carry through in due form” OED) may also be seen as
the realization or publication of writing and text-making, where the latter
becomes more properly a “programming” (rhyming with the cybertechnical
usage), a “pre-writing” or a “prior indication” of what and how to read.
Bergvall hints at this, “each publication … announces the text prior to our
reading it, deciphers the text as we read it … rewrites to an extent the text.”
However, I am suggesting that the text here is itself the prior thing, the
program, while any publication of the text and each subsequent reading in
anyspace and by whomever, is a performance. Caroline Bergvall, “In the Place
of Writing: The Performance of Writing as Sited Practice,” in Assembling
Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally, ed. Romana Huk
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003).
16 Here is a very short list of contemporary examples (with no attempt on my
part at “catastrophic/judgmental interaction,” see 36). Linking is everywhere,
especially on the World Wide Web but also in work distributed by pioneers
of “serious, literary” hypertext such as Eastgate Systems in Cambridge, MA,
publishers of Michael Joyce’s landmark hypertext afternoon: A Story, which
employs the sophisticated local hypertext authoring software “StorySpace.”
Michael Joyce, afternoon: A Story (Cambridge: Eastgate Systems, 1990). The
work of Robert Kendall, for example, A Life Set for Two, exhibits transience
(it is kinetic), conditional linking and user configuration. Robert Kendall,
A Life Set for Two (Cambridge: Eastgate Systems, 1996). Jim Rosenberg’s
Intergrams and Barrier Frames can only be read if the reader intervenes
(it is ergodic in Aarseth’s sense), revealing tone-like clusters of word-
“simultaneities” arranged in spatially represented, diagrammatic, syntactic
relations. Rosenberg, Intergrams; The Barrier Frames: Finality Crystal Shunt
Curl Chant Quickening Giveaway Stare; Diffractions Through: Thirst Weep
Ransack (Frailty) Veer Tide Elegy (Cambridge, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1996).
Charles O. Hartman has produced a body of generative, quasi-aleatory
work, sometimes with other writers, including Jackson Mac Low and Hugh
Kenner, accessible through his books: Hartman and Kenner; Charles O.
Hartman, Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry (Hanover: Wesleyan
University Press, 1996). My own disk- and web-published Indra’s Net series,
described (up to Indra’s Net VII) in “Beyond Codexspace” in this volume,
exemplifies all the textual characteristics mentioned. As World Wide Web
236 NOTES
works extend their abilities to processing as well as linking, they too will
exhibit a wider range of cybertextual features, although aleatory linking
or linking which is reader-determined is already a powerful, if anarchic,
technology which can be easily exploited. Chris Funkhouser has documented
and carefully analyzed much of the poetically inclined early work of this kind
in: Christopher T. Funkhouser, Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of
Forms, 1959–1995 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007). He has
since gone on to address corresponding work, made after the advent of the
web: New Directions in Digital Poetry, ed. Francisco J. Ricardo, International
Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2012).
17 “Late age of print” is a much-discussed phrase originating with: Bolter.
18 The possible effect of the rise of audiovisual channels on the development of
literary cybertext is also discussed in “Beyond Codexspace,” above.
Chapter 6
1 Joan Retallack, “Blue Notes on the Know Ledge,” in The Poethical Wager
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 75–76.
2 Retallack is also noted as a scholar and student of John Cage, one of the most
important artists to have contributed to the field of digitally mediated writing
through his algorithmically generated mesostic texts.
3 Retallack is an example of such a writer, but not one of those who would
resist a practical engagement with or appreciation of “new” media. For
instances of the latter, see some of the discussions associated with: Joel
Kuszai, ed. Poetics@ (New York: Roof Books, 1999). In the course of
these discussions, I wrote, “Some writing … either could not exist in more
‘traditional’ media, or would not be so elegantly presented as it would in
cyber / hypertext … // In particular, I mean texts where ‘chance operations’
and/or algorithmic transformations are applied to given texts and the writer
insists that the ‘real time’ results of these procedures are her inscription on
the surface of a complex medium.” Ibid., 174–175. For resistance to this view,
please refer to the proceeding and following contributions to the thread,
within the book cited, especially those by Ron Silliman. My remarks here are a
revisiting, reformulation, and development of related ideas and arguments.
4 This section is based on discussions in: John Cayley, “Bass Resonance,”
Mute, January 2005; “Bass Resonance,” Electronic Book Review
electropoetics (2005); “Lens: The Practice and Poetics of Writing in
Immersive VR: A Case Study with Maquette,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac
14, no. 5–6 (2006): n.p.
5 Saul Bass was the first film title designer to be given a screen credit by the
Director’s Guild of America (for Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones, 1954).
6 Paratext generally could also be retheorized as complexity of writing surface.
Graphic design elements and framing conventions create depth and structure
time in and throughout the textual object.
7 One of the interesting aspects of Bass’s work is its non-use of Concrete poetics.
One strand of literal art in new media clearly derives from Concrete traditions.
NOTES 237
Note however, that I do not consider linguistic or textual objects that deploy
the rhetoric of Concrete to produce complexity in the surface of writing as
I am developing the concept here. In a sense, Concrete works because the
properties and methods it brings together cannot share the same surface. This
is the trope of Concrete: words are objects; words are not objects.
8 In his work on West Side Story (1961) Bass quietly and wittily played with
real surfaces as a site for (title) writing, with the credits expressed as graffiti
and intermixed with signage. One of the recognized artists in contemporary
film titles, Kyle Cooper, literally etched or collaged the credits for Se7en (1995)
onto film stock. In Bass’s later worked he reverted to the dominant mode of
screen titling in which letters and words “float over” the visual world of the
film on planes that are, conceptually, in an entirely different space, in contrast
with that of the underlying photo-naturalism. This mode is also relatively
familiar in new media work with language in the form of writing that is,
basically, illustrated by visual and audio material rendered in new media.
There is, as yet, little work that is consciously made for the complex writing
surfaces made accessible by new media.
9 I am aware that, following Retallack and others, I am evoking some
mathematical concepts in a rather vague and quasi-metaphorical sense. I am
not pretending to use any of these terms with an informed understanding
of their mathematical counterparts. But I would not like to preclude the
possibility that this could be done, and that some of the procedures loosely
described here could be given fairly precise representation in the mathematics
of complexity and chaos, for example.
10 This analogy might be pursued since the mesostic procedure is also inherently
recursive. The same mesostic process can be recursively applied to the
generated text, as in Emmett Williams’s “universal poetry.”
11 John Cayley, overboard. 2003. Custom software, ambient poetics. http://
programmatology.shadoof.net/?overboard (accessed August 1, 2017); John
Cayley, Translation. 2004. http://programmatology.shadoof.net/?translation
(accessed August 1, 2017). The principles and algorithms underlying
overboard are set out in: John Cayley, “overboard: An Example of Ambient
Time-Based Poetics in Digital Art,” dichtung-digital 32 (2004). http://www.
dichtung-digital.de/2004/2/Cayley/index.htm (accessed August 13, 2017).
12 I have pleasure in acknowledging and thanking Brown University’s Literary
Arts Program for the opportunity to work and direct research in the
university’s Cave during the spring of 2004 and 2005. In particular, I would
like to thank Professor Robert Coover, who invited me to take part in the
Program in this way. While at Brown I benefited from discussions and other
interactions with, among others, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Roberto Simanowski,
Talan Memmott and Bill Seaman (at the neighboring Rhode Island School
of Design). Dmitri Lemmerman was my main collaborator on the projects
discussed here. Further discussion of work for the Cave—from which some of
the following is derived—can be found in: “Lens: The Practice and Poetics of
Writing in Immersive VR: A Case Study with Maquette.”
13 The question arose as to why this phenomenon should be so immediately and
effectively perceptible; and this is discussed in more detail, along with other
aspects of the phenomenology of text in space more generally, in: ibid.
238 NOTES
14 Cayley, Lens. I recommend reviewing the video documentation linked from

the above web page or directly from: http://programmatology.shadoof.
net/?p=works/lens/lensComposite.html (accessed August 4, 2017).
Chapter 7
1 N. Katherine Hayles, “Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink
Textuality,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 16, no. 2 (2003): 277, original
emphasis.
2 Rita Raley, “Interferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codework,”
Electronic Book Review (2002): n.p.
3 “The Code Is Not the Text” in this volume.
4 Hayles, “Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality,” passim, esp.
270–271.
5 Ibid., 275.
6 Ibid., 274. Emphasis in the original.
7 Ibid., 276. Emphasis in the original.
8 Ibid., 274.
9 “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers”; “Virtual Bodies and Flickering
Signifiers.” Discussed extensively in “The Code Is Not the Text” in this volume.
10 See “The Code Is Not the Text.”
11 Raley.
12 Ibid.
13 Glazier. Code is addressed throughout Glazier’s book but especially in the
chapter “Coding Writing, Reading Code,” 96–125.
14 An analysis and something of an apologia for Mez’s work and theory
is provided by: Raley. For more detail, see: “The Code Is Not the Text,”
above. Sandy Baldwin provides a critique of this earlier paper of mine and
also explores a number of ways in which code may enhance the rhetoric
of this kind of work, see: Sandy Baldwin, “Process Window: Code Work,
Code Aesthetics, Code Poetics,” in Ergodic Poetry: A Special Section of
the Cybertext Yearbook 2002, ed. Loss Pequeño Glazier and John Cayley,
Publications of the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture (Jyväskylä:
University of Jyväskylä, 2003).
15 Cf. “The Code Is Not the Text.”
16 The case for “brokenness” as a feature, not a bug, is made in: Baldwin,
“Process Window: Code Work, Code Aesthetics, Code Poetics,” 115.
17 See, again, “The Code Is Not the Text.”
18 Barthes, S/Z. Discussed in: Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual
Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. In S/Z Barthes establishes
a distinction between texts that are readerly and writerly texts, those that,
respectively, invite interpretation and (re)construction by their reader/authors.
19 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, ed. Richard Macksey
and Michael Sprinker, trans. Jane E. Lewin, 1st English ed., Literature, Culture,
Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
NOTES 239
20 Raley. Memmott also refers to this practice as “puncturating” as discussed in:

N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines, Mediawork (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2002), 52.
21 For example, in: Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious,” in On Metapsychology:
The Theory of Psychoanalysis, ed. Angela Richards, The Penguin Freud
Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991).
22 Here I am using “operator” in the mathematical sense. Elsewhere, I
have translated this term more loosely, although more evocatively and
metaphorically as “a class of operations.” Philippe Bootz, “Hypertext:
Solution/Dissolution,” in Ergodic Poetry: A Special Section of the Cybertext
Yearbook 2002, ed. Loss Pequeño Glazier and John Cayley, Publications of
the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture (Jyväskylä: University of
Jyväskylä, 2003), 80, translator’s note.
23 See the discussion of Nelsonian hypertext below, and refer to: ibid.
24 At the time I claimed that, when “turned inside out,” hypertext “links” were
often “nilsk.” The as-yet-to-be-more-fully-answered question of “what is inside
the link” in link-node hypertext, was often posed in the debates which raged
over the long-quiet internet discussion lists. Please refer in particular to the
archives of ht_lit. See “Beyond Codexspace” note 5 above.
25 Rosenberg, Intergrams; The Barrier Frames: Finality Crystal Shunt Curl Chant
Quickening Giveaway Stare; Diffractions Through: Thirst Weep Ransack
(Frailty) Veer Tide Elegy. The Barrier Frames lacks the characteristic diagram
notation in the other Rosenberg pieces cited.
26 This characteristic of a Rosenberg text’s “transience” is one of the things that
distinguish it in Espen Aarseth’s textonomy of cybertext: Aarseth, Cybertext:
Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.
27 In Ted Nelson’s scheme—outlined and discussed below—both flavors
of reduction are represented: spatiality as “docuverse” and linearity as
“permascroll.”
28 Philippe Bootz’s discussion of Rosenberg’s work has been influential on my
own. Bootz, “Hypertext: Solution/Dissolution.” In the theoretical part of
his paper he writes, “Surely here [as a (hyper)text is unfolded] we have an
example of a poetic relationship with language. And this relationship is not
established by the author or the reader, but by the device which transforms
a global/structure/space into a local/action/temporality.” Ibid., 63. When
discussing Rosenberg’s work, this principle is exemplified, “He [Rosenberg]
realized this [a move towards the instantiation of a more general theoretical
position like Bootz’s] by putting forward what is mimetic hypertext, when seen
from the point of view of its unfolding, while at the same time reconfiguring
hypertext as the visualization of local processes.” Ibid., 65.
29 In fact, of course, it would be preferable to establish a parent “Text” class
that was less determinate as to its properties—particularly, for example, its
temporal and ergodic properties—than our inherited and historically instituted
“Text” object. The historical “Text” class would be redefined as extension of
the more abstract parent. This situation, in which prior programming must be
de-kludged or entirely rewritten in order to clarify structures and relationships
is common in real-world programming.
240 NOTES
30 Hayles also finds complexities of temporality represented by remediation, even

through the relatively durable material substrate of print, especially in her
discussion of Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Hayles, Writing Machines, 115.
31 “It is not a question of a negation of time, of a cessation of time in a present
or a simultaneity, but of a different structure, a different stratification of time.”
Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference
(London: Routledge, 1978), 219. Further discussed in: John Cayley, “Inner
Workings: Code and Representations of Interiority in New Media Poetics,”
dichtung-digital 29 (2003): n.p. This piece is based on a presentation at the
“Language and Encoding” Conference, Buffalo, November, 2002, proceedings
edited by Loss Pequeño Glazier.
32 Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.
33 The phrase “golden age” refers to a talk by Robert Coover given as a keynote
address at the 1999 Digital Arts and Culture (DAC) Conference, Georgia Tech,
Atlanta, and published as: Robert Coover, “Literary Hypertext: The Passing
of the Golden Age,” Feed (2000). (Also available at http://nickm.com/vox/
golden_age.html.)
34 Two examples of hypertextual features that are non-standard on the web are
conditional and two-way linking, both of which can be implemented with
client- and/or server-side enhancements to HTML. Refer to the ACM SigWeb
for an introduction to technical research on hypertext: http://www.acm.org/
sigweb.
35 Nelson, Literary Machines 93.1, 2/17.
36 Ibid., front cover.
37 Ibid., 2/14.
38 Nelson introduced this term after the revised publication of Literary Machines
93.1. The terms are also used to bring the docuverse together with Nelson’s
idea for a radical restructuring of data in computing, ZigZag. “Permascroll”
and related terms are defined in: Tuomas J. Lukka, “GZigZag Glossary,”
http://www.nongnu.org/gzz/gl/gl-ns4.html. See also: “GZigZag: A Platform for
Cybertext Experiments,” in Cybertext Yearbook 2000, ed. Markku Eskelinen
and Raine Koskimaa, Publications of the Research Centre for Contemporary
Culture (Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2001); Nelson, Theodor Holm.
“Zigzag.” http://xanadu.com/zigzag (accessed August 13, 2017).
39 Bootz, “Hypertext: Solution/Dissolution.”
40 Hayles, “Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality,” passim.
41 This was clear from the discussion after Nelson’s keynote talk at the Digital
Arts and Culture conference, Brown University, Providence, RI, 2001, when
he side-stepped the question of including some record or archive of text-
generational programming on the permascroll.
42 These are only those features of Rosenberg’s form that I want to highlight
here. The diagram syntax he uses would also, for example, be difficult to
represent.
43 As set out in: Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, 76–97.
44 Nelson, Literary Machines 93.1.
45 “Transcopyright” is neatly defined in: Lukka.
46 As in Hayles discussion of Danielewski: Hayles, Writing Machines, 115 ff.
NOTES 241
47 In Writing Machines, ibid., Hayles finds herself, perhaps, at the limits of this
process, discussing works such as Tom Phillips’ A Humument and Mark
Danielewski’s House of Leaves, that are literally print(ed.) without divorcing
their manifestation of inherent textual properties: properties that can be
represented but not embodied in print. These include the represented and
remediated temporal complexities of Leaves; the process and practice of
Phillips continuing to alter and prepare A Humument; in Talan Memmott’s
work the reader’s ergodic process of revealing textual spaces. Talan
Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia is a work that can be seriously discussed in
“printed out” quotation, as Hayles demonstrates. As we have seen above, it
is more difficult to bracket the simultaneities, for example, of a Rosenberg
intergram. Hayles’ criticism is crucial because it takes the institutions
(especially those of literary criticism) to the edge of an abyss, as Edgar leads
Gloucester to the cliff’s edge in King Lear. Mark Z. Danielewski, House of
Leaves, 2nd ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000); Tom Phillips and W.
H. Mallock, A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, 4th ed. (New York:
Thames & Hudson, 2005); Talan Memmott, From Lexia to Perplexia, 2000.
February. Originally by Trace; then BeeHive Hypertext/Hypermedia Literary
Journal; then The Electronic Literature Collection, vol. 1 (2006).
48 For example, I discuss figures involving compilation and strict logical
development at the end of “The Code Is Not the Text.”
49 Rosenberg is also acutely aware of the necessity to bring programming into
the scene of writing through institutions and tools. He addresses this in:
Jim Rosenberg, “Questions About the Second Move,” in Ergodic Poetry: A
Special Section of the Cybertext Yearbook 2002, ed. Loss Pequeño Glazier
and John Cayley, Publications of the Research Centre for Contemporary
Culture (Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2003). Specifically, Rosenberg
wants tools that allow him to have working literary objects in progress on
his computer desktop: notebooks, as it were, containing signifiers that retain
their temporality and programmability in their native state. Note that the
computer “desktop” and/or “platform” (and/or the “Web” which not so much
of direct concern to Rosenberg) become varieties of metaphoric, if not actual,
institutions here, authorizing and enabling the existence (or not) of particular
objects with particular properties and methods.
50 Hayles, Writing Machines, 110.
51 Code and interiority are taken up in: Cayley, “Inner Workings: Code and
Representations of Interiority in New Media Poetics.”
Chapter 8
1 For me the unresolved locus classicus of this “problematic interplay” is still the
“odd” or “singular” (singulière) materiality of the signifier with which Lacan
distinguished the letter in his “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” and Derrida’s
critique of this position’s ideality in his “Le Facteur de la Vérité.” Jacques Lacan,
“Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in
242 NOTES
English (New York and London: Norton, 2007); Jacques Derrida, “Le facteur
de la vérité,” in The Post Card (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
2 I aim to stand by such a statement of these circumstances despite the fact that
they tend to be seen or recast in quite other terms, as a matter of contrastive
ontologies, for example, as has been pointed out to me, in particular,
by Francisco J. Ricardo, writing, in a comment on these sentences, “[A]
rchitecture denotes a field of abstract study of physical structures, whereas
language implies abstract study of abstract structures. Without the physical,
architecture is incomplete; with the physical, language is overdetermined”
(private communication, his emphasis). I have no trouble seeing it this way
but prefer an inclination in relation to these problems that is engaged with the
experiences of aesthetic practitioners and their addressees—how these agents
live with(in) language and with(in) media. I pretend that we may learn less
about how things are but more about how we may practice and live in our
media-constituted diegetic worlds.
I note, in passing and as a matter of more or less subjective opinion,
that critics and artists who adopt a more ontological approach find it more
difficult, paradoxically, to distinguish, for example, the cultural significance
and affect of “word” and “image.” Perhaps they may see a “pictorial turn”
when presented with material in either language or pictorial representation.
Perhaps they may claim, to quote a very recent example, “There is no aesthetic
or ethical distinction between word and image.” Vanessa Place and Robert
Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009),
17. I aim only to examine how we may live and work differently in differing
worlds.
3 A presentation of this chapter (then still in-progress) was also given to a
workshop of the United Kingdom AHRC-funded “Poetry Beyond Text”
project held at the University of Kent, Canterbury, May 9, 2009. A report
of this workshop will be made available on the web and will be linked from
http://projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/poetrybeyondtext/ (accessed August 2,
2017).
4 It has been pointed out to me that the use of the word “world” in this context
immediately invokes the seminal philosophical and art critical work of, in
particular, Nelson Goodman, which I have briefly reviewed before writing this
note. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co.,
1978). My usages and formulations here are, as already stated, chiefly those of
a practitioner. Nonetheless I would be concerned not to contradict Goodman’s
more far-reaching, analytical treatments of what is clearly related thinking.
“World” in 3D graphics is a technical and functional term, a way of briefly
referring to the algorithmically derived or modulated images of a particular
system in its entirety. Such a system is, by definition, constituted by its media,
and its diegesis is guaranteed by the underlying principles of 3D graphics. The
media-constituted worlds of my own formulations are more complex than this,
especially in terms of their relationship with cultural production, but they are
perhaps only minor instances of “worldmaking” as analyzed by Goodman.
Where I would engage with Goodman would be in terms of the manifolds of
media-constituted worlds that I do assume in some sense generate any and all
the worlds of media within which we happen to dwell.
NOTES 243
5 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Metapictures,” in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual

Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Michel Foucault,
This Is Not a Pipe [“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”], trans. James Harkness (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2008); Ceci n’est pas une pipe (Montpellier:
Éditions Fata Morgana, 1973). In Foucault trans. Harkness, the picture is
erroneously referred to as dated 1926 and as bearing the famous caption as its
title rather than the more usual, La trahison des images, 1929. David Sylvester
et al., René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, 5 vols. (Houston and London: Menil
Foundation; Philip Wilson Publishers, 1992), 1.331–2. CR 303.
6 This phrase is intended to invoke one of the better, published attempts to
identify the specific and genuinely novel properties and methods of artistic
practice in digital and new media, although it should be noted that the use
of “language” here is in its now common extended figurative sense that
approximates, in fact, to “rhetoric” and where the practices under discussion
are rarely, if ever, poetic or literary per se. This is the “language” of the
“linguistic turn” applied to mediated visual, performance and fine art practice.
See: Manovich.
7 J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
8 This argument is elaborated in: Cayley, “Lens: The Practice and Poetics of
Writing in Immersive VR: A Case Study with Maquette.”
9 Still today, for example, writing has authority if it is finished, printed,
and published, although even in the academy there is a slow shift toward
“if it could be printed then in may garner authority.” If it is finished and
inscribed in such a way that it could be printed out, then it may become
subject to judgment even if this “printing out” never actually occurs (a thesis
submitted on CD-ROM). Perhaps the current workings of these distinctions
become clearest when we print (out) what is on a screen. The relationship to
authorization is shown by the common requirement to print “etickets.” What
is on the screen is not a ticket until it is printed; it is not yet the authoritative
representation of a transaction. We must still perform a number of rituals to
make an eticket valid, usually including but not limited to its having been
“printed out.”
10 The apotheosis of this admittedly useful corrective for the field of digitally
mediated literature is: Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media
and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). Although
Kirschenbaum’s book does an excellent job of describing and delineating
the underlying materiality of computation in contemporary culture as well
as situating this necessarily embodied practice historically, the book rarely
achieves critical traction in relation to the instances of digital literature that
it explicitly addresses, and I would argue that this is partly a function of the
general misapprehension of the relationship between language and media that
is explored in this chapter.
11 I am aware that my use of “media” in this context is somewhat unusual
and may be problematic for some readers, especially for art historians and
philosophers. Although I do not intend to conflate or confuse the notions of
“medium” or “media” (as in art history’s “mixed media”) on the one hand,
and the post-McLuhan usages of “media,” I do want us to consider the cultural
244 NOTES
practices of painting and their material supports as a system of media that is

comprised, among other things, of media devices of various kinds, including
paintings. This will, I hope, become clearer as my argument proceeds.
12 Notice how we prefer the metaphor of speech here. Somehow a picture
would have trouble “writing.” This should probably be “seen” as one of
the vestiges of logocentrism. Note that Mitchell entitles the section of his
metapictures chapter that is devoted to La trahison des images “Talking
Metapictures.” Mitchell, “Metapictures,” 64. My emphasis. Another recent
example is the title of an October article, also briefly cited below: Harry
Cooper, “Speak, Painting: Word and Device in Early Johns,” October 127
(2009): 49–76.
13 Just to be clear: I am speaking of these—after all quite typical, expository—
words. I am fully aware, as should be obvious from the context, that certain
words/instances of language call for specific media.
14 Foucault’s initial move, a consideration of the painting as calligram, would
have run counter to the inclination I identify. But this was a misdirection, and
he found himself unravelling (Harkness’ doubtful translation) or undoing
(le calligramme défait) something that had never been made as such, as a
calligram, that is. Foucault’s own discussion of the caption, the space between
the image and word (see below), is the undoing of something that was never
“done up” or “written out” in the first place. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 28;
Cooper, 57.
15 Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image Music Text (London:
Fontana Press, 1977); “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image Music Text (London:
Fontana Press, 1977). Mitchell does not cite Barthes in his Picture Theory
discussion of metapicture. He suggests later that Barthes’s analysis is chiefly at
the service of “connections between semiotic structures and ideology,” whereas
I find Barthes’s analysis pertinent to cultural practice. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture
Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), 86n7.
16 Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” 17. Emphasis in original.
17 Ibid., 29.
18 This relationship is also, of course, also often designated and theorized as
indexical. See, inter alia, Rosalind E. Krauss, “Notes on the Index,” October
3–4 (1977): 68–81; 58–67. It is, moreover and by the way, less characterized
by the imaginary—“ ‘magical’ fictional”—than even the relationship of
cinema to the world due to photography’s strange, momentary and, crucially,
past relation to human temporality. Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” 45. As
Barthes pointed out, the photograph is an index, not of “what is” but “what
was” and/or what we could not have seen ourselves, and this makes it a new
type of object in our diegetic worlds.
Later, in Camera Lucida—which is more about the relationship of
“the Photograph” to a particular subject and to subjectivity as instituted by
cultural practices—Barthes nonetheless goes so far as to say, “By nature, the
Photograph (…) has something tautological about it: a pipe, here, is always
and intractably a pipe.” [!] Camera Lucida [La Chambre Claire], trans.
Richard Howard, First American paperback ed. (New York: Hill and Wang,
1982), 5.
NOTES 245
19 Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” 45.

20 Ibid., 51.
21 Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” 17. Emphasis in original.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 18.
24 The phrase “syntagmatic ‘flow’” is also from Barthes who uses diegesis in a
sense that is close to my own as compared with the discourses of film and
narrative. Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” 51. If symbolic elements can
form a series that appear to be what Barthes calls “syntagm as nature” and I
would say is a part of the same (media-constituted) world, then this establishes
(coherent) diegesis. But for meaning to emerge, this circumstance also demands
a fundamental break or “tear” (also in Barthes) that is a requisite of symbolic
practice, of language in process. Barthes’s thinking along these lines produces
this superb and challenging final sentence to his “Rhetoric of the Image,”
Without wishing to infer too quickly from the image to semiology in general,
one can nevertheless venture that the world of total meaning is torn internally
(structurally) between system as culture and syntagm as nature: the works of
mass communications all combine, through diverse and diversely successful
dialectics, the fascination of nature, that of story, diegesis, syntagm, and the
intelligibility of a culture, withdrawn into a few discontinuous symbols which
men ‘decline’ in the shelter of their living speech. Ibid.
25 Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” 18.
26 I am grateful to Francisco J. Ricardo for encouraging me to bring John
Baldessari into this discussion. Doing so is particularly fortuitous in that
Baldessari was an artist-curator/consultant for “Magritte and Contemporary
Art,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art November 19, 2006–March
4, 2007. Catalogue: Stephanie Barron and Michel Draguet, Magritte and
Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images (Los Angeles and Ghent: Los
Angeles County Museum of Art; Ludion, 2006).
27 Examples can be consulted in: Coosje Van Bruggen, John Baldessari (New
York: Rizzoli, 1990), 138–141. Yellow (With Onlookers), 1986; Bloody
Sundae, 1987; and Three Red Paintings, 1988.
28 For example: Yellow Harmonica (With Turn), 1987. Reproduced in: ibid., 161.
29 For example: The Dupress Series: Person Climbing Exterior Wall of Tall
Building / Person on Ledge of Tall Building / Person on Girders of Unfinished
Tall Building, 2003. Reproduced in: Marie de Brugerolle, John Baldessari:
From Life (Nimes and Paris: Carré d’Art_Musée d’art contemporain; École
nationale supérieure des beaux-art de Paris, 2005), 144–145.
30 As if to prove this, Magritte has also painted a version of his Treachery on an
easel in a room where there also dwells another slightly more abstract, equally
troublesome “pipe.” Les Deux mystères (1966, Catalogue raisonné 1038)
reproduced as plate 4 in: Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe.
31 Of course, it could be a “wall” and, in fact, the wall in the later painting,
Les Deux mystères, against which a “pipe” is also suspended, is painted in a
similar nondescript, all but textureless manner. This background, however,
is determined as “wall” by the figurative “wooden floor” that abuts it. Yet
even in this painting there is strong ambiguity as to whether its larger pipe is
246 NOTES
suspended from (how?), painted on, or floating within the so-called, so-painted
“wall.” This relationship of all but purely notional “wall” to the projection-
surface “walls” of the Cave is suggestive. Both instances of “wall” exist and, at
the same time, do not exist for the purposes of poiesis in their respective media.
32 Because, in the diegesis of the painting, it would be occluded by some measure
of beige “fog.” Note that the term “fog” is a technical term in 3D graphics: “A
rendering technique that can be used to simulate atmospheric effects such as
haze, fog, and smog by fading object colors to a background color based on
distance from the viewer, giving a depth cue.” David Shriener et al., OpenGL
Programming Guide: Fourth Edition: The Official Guide to Learning
OpenGL, Version 1.4 (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2004), 721.
33 I prefer to approach the issues that concern me directly through Foucault,
but compare: Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual
Representation, 70; Cooper, 56n15; 57. Both Mitchell and Cooper quote from
the passages in Foucault that I discuss, although using Harkness’s translation
unaltered, where its slight misdirections are less crucial to their arguments.
34 Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 28.
35 This is my own translation, modifying and improving Harkness. Cf. Ceci n’est
pas une pipe, 34; This Is Not a Pipe, 28.
36 My own, slightly interpretative but careful translation of:
La petite bande mince, incolore et neutre qui, dans le dessin de Magritte sépare
le texte et la figure, il faut y voir un creux, une région incertaine et brumeuse
qui sépare maintenant la pipe flottant dans son ciel d’image, et le piétinement
terrestre des mot défilant sur leur ligne successive. Encore est-ce trop de dire
qu’il y a un vide ou une lacune: c’est plutôt une absence d’espace, un effacement
de ‘lieu commun’ entre les signes de l’écriture et les lignes de l’image. Ceci n’est
pas une pipe, 34.
37 Although I believe that the reader should be able to follow and visualize the
work in my prose, an actual translation of The Treachery into immersive artificial
3D graphics for the Cave has been produced as a maquette, “This Is (Not)
Writing,” and is available to download, along with previewing software that will
render it (without immersion of course) on standard personal computers, from:
http://programmatology.shadoof.net/?notwriting (accessed August 13, 2017).
38 For some readers, the conception of an object graphically distorted like
this may evoke ostensibly parallel discussions of anamorphic images such
as the well-known and often-discussed anamorphic skull in Holbein’s The
Ambassadors. (This image recently adorned the cover of: Mark B. N. Hansen,
New Philosophy for New Media [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006].)
There might seem to be a similar problem concerning the point at which the
distorted image ceases to be a representation of what it represents. However,
in the first place the anamorphic transformation of the image is studied,
deliberate, and enforces a break with the normal diegetic world of image-
viewing. An out-of-the-ordinary point of view must be assumed in relation to
the distorted image in order to see it as a normalized or construable optical
representation. In the circumstances described in our thought experiment, the
rotation of the objects is entirely regular, easy to describe, and in keeping with
NOTES 247
the way that objects are viewed in space. Simply walking around the objects
would produce the same effects. Moreover, in the case of linguistic material,
the effacement of the representation is catastrophic rather than continuous.
Neither is it entirely or even primarily a matter of judgment. There is a
necessary relation between an inscription and the surface-that-is-no-surface. In
our thought experiment, the pipe is in fact undergoing anamorphic processes
of transformation—in 3D graphics terms—but these are transformations
that we understand and construe in terms of the human optical experience
of objects in space. It simply happens to be the case that there are few such
experiences of inscription in “real-world” space. (A sign mounted so as to
spin on a mast would be an example and note that, basically, such a sign is
simply ignored except during those moments when it can be read.) In the
artificial world of the Cave, it might be argued, for example, that if you rotate
an inscription in front of a human point of view it “should” always simply
look the same—or least remain readable—to that point of view (it appears
not to rotate). In the system’s frame of reference, the inscription-as-object
would be rotating, but it would obey the constraints of the phenomenology
of inscriptions addressed to humans rather than that of optically rendered
3D objects. For certain of my earlier works in the Cave, I instituted such a
“phenomenology” of letters in space (although without theorizing it in this
way) in that I had all individual letters (my “atoms” of graphic inscription)
rotate continuously to “face” the primary tracked point of view as it moved
through the graphics world. From the phenomenologist’s point of view, this is
a kludge, a workaround. Perhaps what we really require are linguistic objects
that are always equally readable regardless of the position from which they
are viewed and without their having, at least conceptually, to transform in
any way—to rotate, translate, or scale—in order to maintain the properties of
readability that they were given when they were inscribed.
39 In one interpretation that is also suggestive of the different ways in which
language as inscription relates to media, this is simply a particularly stark and
clear instance of a phenomenon originally pointed out to me by the historian
of Chinese art, Robert Harrist. A representation of writing should not be
readable. If it is readable then it is no longer a representation of writing,
it is writing. See: Robert E. Harrist Jr., “Book from the Sky at Princeton:
Reflections on Scale, Sense, and Sound,” in Persistence | Transformation: Text
as Image in the Art of Xu Bing, ed. Jerome Silbergeld and Dora C. Y. Ching
(Princeton, NJ: P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art, 2006),
35–37.
One can also see how catastrophic shifts back and forth from the
representation of writing to writing itself would be likely to ally themselves
with breaks in media-constituted diegesis if one thinks back to photography
and imagines the photo-naturalistic depiction of a room containing a table
strewn with of sheets writing that is “out of focus” in terms of depth of field.
If the writing were, through some form of artifice, brought into focus, and
assuming it was large enough to be readable, it would break both the diegesis
of photo-naturalism while simultaneously and suddenly addressing us as
writing.
248 NOTES
40 In fact, of course, when we do this, we will be “seeing the object” projected on

another surface which may also have a spectral background projected onto it.
Chapter 9
1 Throughout this chapter, I refer to the Google “corpus,” implicitly treating the
inscribed text that is addressed by the Google indexing engines as if it were
a body of material similar to or commensurate with other textual corpora
such as might be compiled into a particular author’s corpus or the corpora
put together and studied by corpus linguists such as the Brown Corpus, the
Corpus of Contemporary American English, the British National Corpus, and
the American National Corpus.
2 Whenever I use the word “with” in this context, my intention is to highlight
the underlying, now chiefly archaic, sense of “against” that was once more
active in the Anglo-Saxon preposition, although we do still both work and
fight with others. This negative apotropaic inclination of “with” is preserved
by contemporary English in words like “withhold,” “withdraw,” and
“withstand.”
3 “Flarf,” the coinage attributed to Gary Sullivan, is a name for a practice
of poetic writing. There exists a “Flarf(ist) Collective” of writers, mostly
poets, who have exchanged and published work under its aegis. (See the
Flarf feature in the excellent online Jacket Magazine, Jacket 30, July 2006,
http://jacketmagazine.com/30/index.shtml [accessed August 2, 2017].)
Wikipedia describes its aesthetic as “dedicated to the exploration of ‘the
inappropriate’” (as of: February 16, 2011) and this seems right to me. It’s a
significant poetic movement of the late twentieth, early twenty-first centuries
for which, personally and critically, I have a high regard. However, Flarf
is now also closely associated with methods of composition that make
extensive use of internet searches engines since they are, clearly, well adapted
for gathering large amounts of “inappropriate” linguistic material. The
association is unfortunate since there are many, many other ways to explore
the inappropriate and gather relevant exempla. The identification of Flarf with
Google-mining is, itself, inappropriate Flarf. At this point in my argument,
my aim is simply to contrast the Flarfist use of Google-as-grab-bag versus a
sustained aesthetic engagement with the cultural vectors that Google both
offers and denies. Engagement at the level of computation may be a key to
making and maintaining this distinction.
4 Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, “Of the Institution and Education of
Children,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays: French, German and Italian,
The Harvard Classics (New York: P. F. Collier & Son Company, 1910).
5 European Science Foundation (ESF) workshop: “Neuroesthetics: When Art
and the Brain Collide,” September 24–25, 2009, IULM, Milan, Italy.
6 Chrisley’s presentation at the conference was titled “A cognitive approach
to the esthetic experience,” but his introduction of the “edge of chaos” was
largely anecdotal, deriving from experiments with robotic cognition. Chrisley
was then a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Sussex.
NOTES 249
7 Markov models, processes, chains—named for the Russian mathematician,

Andrey Markov (1856–1922)—provide formal descriptions for systems with
a finite number of elements in successive states. Using such a model, we only
have to know the relative frequency of the elements in a system in order to
be able to generate further sequences of these elements, probabilistically, that
will be, as it were, characteristic of the system. These models can be applied
to language, taking any distinct linguistic element—letter, phoneme, syllable,
word, phrase, etc.—as the units being considered. A sequence of n elements
considered as a unit is known as an ngram or n-gram. A three-word phrase
may be treated as an n-gram, and if we search for such a phrase, double-
quoted, in Google, we get a “count” that can be used as a relative frequency
for that phrase within the domain of the Google-indexed internet “corpus”
of linguistic tokens. Refinements of such purely statistical language models
are now proven to be remarkably powerful, and underlie, for example, much
automated translation. The existence of the internet-as-corpus and its Google
search boxes puts such linguistic modeling in the hands of everyone. Google
and its rival service providers are aware of non-venal uses for this data.
Recently there was a short, rather dismissive piece on the Google labs: Books
Ngram Viewer (http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/) in the London Review of
Books. Jenny Diski, “Short Cuts,” London Review of Books 33, no. 2 (2011:
20). A Science article is referred to that describes work underlying the Ngram
viewer in more detail. Jean-Baptiste Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis of
Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science 331, no. 6014 (2011:
176–182). Another contextually relevant discussion of Markov chains can
be found in: Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions,
Computer Games, and Software Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009),
203–205.
8 Apart from specifics discussed here, I will cite two sensational sociopolitical
examples. First, there is Google’s dubiously or unprincipled accommodation
of Chinese state censorship as a Chinese language news provider in February
2004, as an investor in the Chinese search site Baidu, by voluntarily blocking
politically sensitive searches in January 2006, and its subsequent purportedly
principled retreat from the Chinese search “market” in 2010. John Battelle,
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and
Transformed Our Culture, updated with new chapter in this edition (New
York: Portfolio, 2006); Bianca Bosker, “Google Shuts Down China Search,
Redirects Users to Hong Kong,” Huffington Post, March 23, 2010, updated
May 25, 2011; Jonathan Watts, “China’s Internet Crackdown Forced Google
Retreat,” The Guardian, January 13, 2010. Second, there is the purported
manipulation of the type-ahead suggestions provided by Google Instant.
Bianca Bosker, “Google Instant Blocks Sexy Searches,” Huffington Post,
September 9, 2010, updated May 25, 2011.
9 For one simple example, Microsoft’s Bing treats line endings differently. Line
endings (e.g., carriage returns) don’t break sequences as they do for Google.
For neither engine, however, is this a recognition of differences or distinctions
that might be significant for poetics. The fact that we can be fairly certain
that differential treatment of line endings is technical and in the service of
commerce rather than poetic or, for example, rhetorical, speaks volumes
250 NOTES
concerning Google as an engine of mis- or undirected culture formation.

Its undoubtedly “powerful” forces are self-trammeled by concerns to which
Google is strategically blind and to which we, as producers of culture with
other motivations, seem already to have become blind. If we fail to start
noticing these motivated distinctions now, it will soon be too late since they
will cease to exist. In the ontology of software, if an object is not implemented,
it cannot have instances.
A further note on line endings: It is interesting to remark that although
line endings break word (or token) sequences in Google’s indexing of web
pages—chiefly HTML or HTML-derived content—token sequences are not
broken by corresponding punctuation or tagging when Google indexes the
predominantly pdf-derived content of Google Books. This is simply one
example of many conditions demonstrating that when you search these two
domains, you search them differently with no explicit signal of this fact.
The underlying software is taking away any care that you might have had
for the way in which you are searching. If your relationship to the corpus
is transactional and you understand the nature of the underlying contract,
this is fine. My point is that now, when you search Google, you increasingly
treat it as if you are searching all of inscribed culture. Once again, this is fine,
if you realize what you are doing—research that is abbreviated, shorthand,
provisional, or pragmatic for example—and yet after having qualified
your understanding of the scope of the Google corpus, do you also take
responsibility for your failure to know any details of the procedures by which
it undertakes the search on your behalf, how that search addresses the corpus,
the manner in which the results are delivered, and so on?
10 And ultimately or more accurately: whoever or whatever owns Google.
11 See below. Daniel C. Howe adds, “Of course Google automatically/
procedurally indexes our pages/content, yet makes it illegal or at least, they
would claim, a violation of their terms of service for us to do the same to
them.”
12 Daniel C. Howe adds, “in tiny droplets,” that are regulated by: Google.
13 The fact that we accept—pragmatically, gratefully—Google’s indexing of the
corpus represented by inscribed textuality on the internet is the sign, I believe,
of an order-of-magnitude shift in the scale of the cultural archive and our
engagement with it as humans. I provide brief remarks on these issues here,
acutely aware that they deserve extensive and detailed consideration.
In a sense the world and the “knowledge” or “culture” that is in it—call it
“content”—has not and will not change. Human life is what it is. Nonetheless
we tend to agree that our ability to archive this content in order to make it
recordable and manipulable has radically changed during the modern period.
Scholars of the age of Francis Bacon began to lose hold of any sense that
they might read and thus know “everything.” In the maturity of print culture,
we have long ago lost sight of being able to read or “know” everything in a
particular discipline, let alone “everything” per se. However, we were wont to
believe that all inscribed textuality might be collected in libraries or traditional
archives and that, at the very least, a “union catalogue,” the product of human
labor, would be able to give us access to any necessary article of knowledge,
with universities curating and signaling the originality of purported
NOTES 251
contributions to this sum of content. However, just as the efflorescence of

print made it literally impossible to read everything, the explosion of content-
creation that is enabled by programmable and networked media now makes it
literally impossible for humans to index everything in their archives. Humans
are already, now, not able to create a catalogue of the articles of culture that
they have, collectively, created.
Instead, humans write software, processes that will index these archives.
These processes will reflect human culture back to its maker-consumers and
consumer-makers. This is already what Google does for us. At first it seemed
that the company did this almost gratuitously, more or less as a function of
Silicon Valley utopianism and naivety. Now this intensely, importantly cultural
service is fundamentally skewed and twisted by commerce, by a requirement
to generate advertising revenues that are dependent on the most advanced
forms of capitalism. These circumstances may have been all but inevitable, but
the time for decisions has come. What computational processes do we want to
create and have running for us, in order to index or otherwise represent for us
the contents of the cultures that we are making?
Especially in questions following her presentation, “Digital Archives:
The Missing Context,” http://www.brown.edu/Conference/animating/content/
documents/SmithRumseyabstract.pdf for the “Animating Archives: Making
New Media Matter” conference held at Brown University, December 3–5,
2009, http://www.brown.edu/Conference/animating/index.html. Abby Smith
Rumsey, Director of the Scholarly Communication Institute, University of
Virginia Library spoke cogently to these issues.
14 Saturday October 7, 2009.
15 Clearly, my underlying argument resonates with traditionalist Humanities
anxieties about scholarship and the effects on scholarship of the tools and
resources which Google has suddenly provided. Geoffrey Nunberg, “Google’s
Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars,” The Chronicle of Higher Education,
August 31, 2009. However, I am not so much concerned with the preservation
of cultural standards. I am entirely content that institutions should change. I
just don’t think that such change should be at the whim of unacknowledged,
ill-considered, and venal forces. The cultural vectors opened up by Google will
only ever be able to change our institutions coherently and generatively if they
remain susceptible to the values and standards of all our institutions, not only
our mercantile and marketing institutions.
16 Daniel C. Howe suggests additional reference to: Jonathan Lethem, “The
Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” Harper’s Magazine, February 2007. More
recently there is also the novel-as-manifesto-of-appropriation: David Shields,
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). The work
of the late American novelist Kathy Acker was known for its techniques of
appropriation, not to say plagiarism. In the story “Pierre Menard, Author of
Don Quixote” Jorge Luis Borges imagines a French writer, Menard, who is
so able to immerse himself in the earlier work that he “re-creates” it word for
word. Recent gestures in the realm of Conceptual Poetics are relevant here.
Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day consists of a straightforward transcription of the
September 1, 2000 issue of the New York Times within the format and design
of a standard 836-page book. Kenneth Goldsmith, Day (New Barrington: The
252 NOTES
Figures, 2003). In a further conceptual gesture, Kent Johnson appropriated

this work as his “own” with the connivance of Buffalo-based small press
Blazevox by simply pasting over all references to Goldsmith, replacing them
with a Johnson overlay. I possess a copy of the altered book, signed by the
(latter) publisher.
17 I could, of course, do this in other domains using the resources of other
institutions, but the thought of what this would mean is overwhelming—a life-
changing shift into research on natural language, with single-minded devotion
to finding or building the databases one would need. Google promises me an
accessible corpus and even tells me that it is always already mine and everyone
else’s—in good net-utopian terms—but then denies me service at crucial
moments when I am beginning to build a poetic.
18 Extracts from Google’s Terms of Service, supplied by Daniel C. Howe:
2.1 In order to use the Services, you must first agree to the Terms. You may not
use the Services if you do not accept the Terms ….
2.2 You can accept the Terms by:
(A) clicking to accept or agree to the Terms, where this option is made available
to you by Google in the user interface for any Service; or
(B) by actually using the Services. In this case, you understand and agree that
Google will treat your use of the Services as acceptance of the Terms from that
point onwards ….
4.5 You acknowledge and agree that while Google may not currently have set
a fixed upper limit on the number of transmissions you may send or receive
through the Services or on the amount of storage space used for the provision
of any Service, such fixed upper limits may be set by Google at any time, at
Google’s discretion.
5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any
means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you
have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google.
You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services
through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and
shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file
present on the Services.
19 The following text is based on a short piece by Samuel Beckett that eventually
became, as a final text in English, three fragments from: Samuel Beckett, How
It Is [Comment c’est], trans. Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1964). I
searched Google for successively longer sequences of double-quote-delimited
words from these fragments with the qualifiers: -Beckett -Beckett’s -Beckett’s
(with prime and apostrophe) looking for pages on which the sequences
occurred but are not associated with Beckett. The small letters beside each
phrase may now be keyed to one of the webpages from which the phrases
are hereby deemed to be quoted as at least cached by Google on Saturday
February 15, 2010. They are not, that is, quoted from Beckett. ahttp://books.
google.com/books?id=RTRorA6RK-oC&pg=PA49&lpg=PA49&dq=%22blu
NOTES 253
e+and+white+of+sky%22; bmyhyggelig.blogspot.com/2009/12/moment-still.
html; cgapersblock.com/mechanics/2009/06/30/inside-a-toxic-tour/; dlegacygt.
com/forums/showthread.php?t=130524&goto=newpost; ematpringle.
blogspot.com/; fwww.nrl.navy.mil/content.php?P=03REVIEW195; gwww.
mattcutts.com/blog/gmail-inbox-zero/; hwww.theshadowbox.net/forum/index.
php?topic=10610.30; iwww.mountzion.org/johnbunyan/text/bun-caution.
htm; jntl.matrix.com.br/pfilho/html/lyrics/m/mr_blue.txt; kiceagelanguage.
com/Ducks/ducks_part1.pdf; lcucc.survex.com/expo/smkridge/204/uworld.
html; mwww.redroom.com/blog/ericka-lutz/opening-and-closing; nhttp://
www.fibromyalgia-symptoms.org/forums/Fibromyalgia_Support_Groups/
Stomach_pain_and_period_pain_/; °http://www.archive.org/stream/
soundandthefurya013056mbp/soundandthefurya013056mbp_djvu.txt; pwww.
theinsider.com/news/928384_Thanks_for_the_Laughs_Harvey; qhttp://books.
google.com/books?id=ti_rI-aYuw4C&pg=PA337&lpg=PA337&dq=%22the
re%27s+no+sense+in+that+now%22; rbooks.google.com/books?id=LCf0VP
aT1wwC&pg=PA213&lpg=PA213&dq=%22been+none+for+a+long+time+
now%22; swww.aypsite.org/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=5166; tsecure.bebo.
com/Profile.jsp?MemberId=1471591674; usolpadeine.net/acetone/lyrics/cindy.
html; vwww.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1076221.html; wbooks.google.com/
books?id=gconvZ-DRLsC&pg=PA121&lpg=PA121&dq=%22thirst+the+t
ongue%22; xwww.flickr.com/photos/32296433@N07/3558411711/; yhttp://
www.popmonk.com/quotes/challenge.htm; zhttp://t2.thai360.com/index.
php?/topic/48834-isan-tawan-daeng-re-visited/; aahttp://mshester.blogspot.
com/2008/03/winter-you-are-finished.html; bben.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image.
This text also comprises the final part of “The Image,” reproduced in
a corrected translation in: The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, ed. S. E.
Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995). Despite the explanation given in
the notes, pp. 283–284, it seems bizarre to me that the more or less complete
version as found in How It Is, pp. 28–31 is not preferred for “The Image.”
Certainly, for the final part of the piece, used here, I much prefer Beckett’s own
renderings, for example, “I stay there no more thirst the tongue goes in the
mouth closes it must be a straight line now it’s over it’s done I’ve had the image”
rather than Edith Fournier’s “I stay like this no more thirst the tongue goes in
the mouth closes it must be a straight line now it’s done I’ve done the image.”
20 In actual fact, I made this text by first alphabetically sorting the gathered
sequences and only then rearranging them as little as possible in order to
provide some kind of relatively coherent diegesis.
21 This preliminary piece from The Readers Project may be accessed from http://
thereadersproject.org.
22 There is a great deal that could be written about The Readers Project: about
how it operates and engages literary aesthetics from a critical or theoretical
perspective, most of which would not be entirely relevant to the present
discussion. However, it may be worth noting and commenting briefly on
this sense of “proximate.” A proximate or neighboring word may be one
that is contiguous with a reference word. In linguistics, such a word, for
example, collocates with the reference word if it follows it in the line of the
syntagm, in the metonymic dimension as Roman Jakobson called it. Another
notion of proximity—in the complementary metaphoric dimension, that of
254 NOTES
replacement—would see words such as synonyms or antonyms as (virtually)

proximate to particular words of reference in the text. However, proximity
or neighborhood may also be defined, in The Readers Project, in terms of the
typographic, and this neglected dimension of textuality reveals itself, in our
aesthetic analysis, as vital to, if not constitutive of, reading. (Typography is
not, perhaps, neglected as a graphic art, but it is, arguably, neglected as an art
of reading, as a literary art, sensu stricto.) Specifically, readers in the project
currently have access to databases of information about all the actual word
pairs in a text that they are “reading” combined with any (and all) third words
existing in the text. Clearly the vast majority of these three-word combinations
will not occur anywhere in the text itself as contiguous syntagms. These
sequences of three words we call “perigrams” to distinguish them both from
“bigrams” and “trigrams” in standard Markov analysis. Once we have derived
a text’s perigrams, we then use Google to find counts for their frequencies in the
internet corpus, and (for the moment) discard any perigrams with zero counts.
This allows the readers to follow the standard syntagmatic line but to check
arbitrary typographically neighboring words to see whether they would form a
perigram that occurs in the natural language of the Google-accessible corpus. If
they do, a particular reader may be allowed to follow the alternate syntagmatic
line of reading that it has discovered in its typographic neighborhood.
Clearly “proximity” may be redefined in accordance with other features
of linguistic items, including, for example, orthographic features. Thus the
“mesostic” reader mentioned above looks for words containing particular
letters and considers them “proximate” if they contain a letter that it requires
to read-while-spelling. In point of fact, the current mesostic reader takes
further cognizance of physical typographic proximity and also what one might
call the relative “perigrammatic proximity” (just described) of two words that
it might be about to read, for example, and that both contain the letter it needs
to spell. It will prefer to read a word that is more proximate in the maximum
number of dimensions. John Cayley, and Daniel C. Howe. The Readers
Project. 2009. http://thereadersproject.org (accessed August 13, 2017).
A more extensive methodological and computational introduction to The
Readers Project was, at the time of writing, in final stages of review for
Siggraph 2011 and is now published as: Daniel C. Howe and John Cayley,
“The Readers Project: Procedural Agents and Literary Vectors,” Leonardo 44,
no. 4 (2011): 317–324.
23 See above. A normal Markov model applied to language is only concerned
with the syntagmatic dimension of language and takes no account of any
typographic structure that it may have. The above definition of “perigrams” in
The Readers Project takes some account of typography and thus complicates
the standard Markov model.
Chapter 10
1 Confucius (= Kong Fuzi), Confucius: The Great Digest, the Unwobbling Pivot,
the Analects, trans. Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1969), 20. The
NOTES 255
quoted text is Pound’s ideogrammic gloss for the character cheng (Wade-Giles:
ch’eng) often translated as “sincerity.” See also: The Cantos, LXXVI, 468/474.
2 N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary,
Ward-Phillips Lectures in English Language and Literature (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame, 2008).
3 Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
4 A representative quote: “Electronic literature extends the traditional functions
of print literature in creating recursive feedback loops between explicit
articulation, conscious thought, and embodied sensorimotor knowledge ….
While print literature also operates in this way, electronic literature performs
the additional function of entwining human ways of knowing with machine
cognitions.” N. Katherine Hayles, “Electronic Literature: What Is It?” in
Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame, 2008), 135. For “dynamic heterarchies” see: N. Katherine
Hayles “Distributed Cognition in/at Work: Strickland, Lawson Jaramillo, and
Ryan’s slippingglimpse,” Frame 21, no. 1 (2008): 15–29.
5 Liu, 179.
6 Ibid., 3.
7 Ibid., 400, note 8.
8 I am happy to see that this phrase has now been taken up quite widely in the
literature, not least in Hayles’s new book (Hayles, “Electronic Literature: What
Is It?”) and, for example, in: Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer, eds., The
Aesthetics of Net Literature: Writing, Reading and Playing in Programmable
Media, Media Upheavals (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007). The phrase can also be
shortened to “writing in programmable media” since programming enables
network. The mark of an explicit relationship with practices of coding will
continue to enrich and to specify our literary practices in these media, but
it is not yet clear to me that programmability and processing give rise to all
their distinguishing characteristics, or, for that matter, operate significantly or
affectively in every example of those practices to which we turn our attention.
Programming enables the network but cultural production on the net does
not always practice coding and neither does every instance of writing in
digital media. As a term, “writing digital media” attempts an abbreviated
reference to this situation by encapsulating the conjunction of networked and
programmable media, without specifying the precise grammar that underlies
this conjunction. I am also anxious to note, in passing, that I consider coding
to be a distinct cultural practice, distinct, that is from writing, for example.
9 In email communication, Aden Evens has pointed out that my use of “form”
as in “persistent form” differs from a stricter usage that would more closely
ally the term with abstract form or, for example, the “concepts” underlying
conceptual art, whereas my persistent form is—I acknowledge this and
the point is brought into my argument explicitly below—implicated with
particular (literary) material cultural manifestations, particular media that are
able to bear particular forms without, however, determining “content” or its
significance and affect. I agree that these distinctions require some elaboration
beyond the scope of this chapter. Evens writes, “form is what the concept
determines, whereas materiality manifests this form but also exceeds it. In
256 NOTES
‘traditional’ artworks, this excess is precisely what makes the work great.
That is, the formal is what can be fully captured by the digital, it is what gets
preserved as ‘information’ ” (email communication, August 4, 2008). My
persistent form is not precisely this excess, but it would enable such excess
to survive the work and its concept. I believe that the final paragraphs of
Terry Harpold’s interesting extended gloss on “hypertext” refer to these deep
problems of form in the practices of writing (in) digital media—of form in
inherited vs. programmable media, I might say. Terry Harpold, “Hypertext,”
in Glossalalia, ed. Julian Wolfreys and Harun Karim Thomas (New York:
Routledge, 2003).
10 Liu, 389.
11 Jacques Derrida, “The Word Processor,” in Paper Machine (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2005), 25.
12 Ibid.
13 Jacques Derrida, “The Book to Come,” in Paper Machine (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2005), 15.
14 Nelson’s conception of the “permascroll” was introduced after the last
revision of: Nelson, Literary Machines 93.1. As such it does not seem to
be often discussed. A definition, with related terms, can be found here:
Lukka. The permascroll is the sequential record of all significant textual (or
literary) events. A text would simply be a set of references to “spans” of the
permascroll (which would clearly not be sequential). As here, for Derrida, this
kind of totalizing structure designed to record the minutest discrete details
of everything that can be recorded (begging the most significant of questions,
namely: “What is the minutest discrete detail of everything?”) is a potential
apotheosis of literature, but one that also destroys literature by foreclosing
precisely the kinds of development in culture and cultural production that
we are addressing. It allows that literature might end, but in an ultimate
sense on which “the book,” by contrast, does not insist. I have discussed the
permascroll earlier and above, see: “Time Code Language” in this volume.
15 Jacques Derrida, “Paper or Me, You Know …,” in Paper Machine (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 65.
16 Ibid.
17 Liu, 179.
18 Ibid., 323.
19 Instantaneous, simultaneous, and on-demand information is the engine of
the postindustrial “now” submitting history to creative destruction, and it is
the destruction of this eternal “now” or self-evident presence of information,
therefore, that will have the most critical and aesthetic potential. Strong
art will be about the “destruction of destruction” or, put another way, the
recognition of the destructiveness in creation. Ibid., 8–9. See also: ibid.,
chapter 11, passim.
20 I am sometimes using the phrase “expressive programming” here, and this is
because of my focus on works that are explicitly coded as an aspect of their
composition and production, but I am thinking of and alluding to the more
general term “expressive processing” which is the subject of an important
monograph. Wardrip-Fruin.
NOTES 257
21 We might consider, in passing, how this “ease” and “facility” (and “cool”)
in relation to literary projects that previously demand special “effort” on
the part of both writer and reader may one day alter our reading of the
pioneering criticism of writing in digital media. Espen Aarseth subtitled his
much-cited Cybertext, “perspectives on ergodic literature,” and suggested
that the special effort required of readers who address writing in these media
was a better indication of its specificities than, for example, non-linearity.
But what happens when such effort becomes less than that required to turn
a page or use an index? Cf. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic
Literature.
22 A. Braxton Soderman, Mémoire involontaire No. 1, 2008. Electronic
Literature Collection, vol. 2 (2011), http://collection.eliterature.org/2/works/
soderman_memory.html (accessed August 13, 2017).
23 Brian Kim Stefans, “Stops and Rebels: A Critique of Hypertext,” in
Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (Berkeley, CA: Atelos, 2003); Cayley,
“overboard: An Example of Ambient Time-Based Poetics in Digital Art.”
24 Justin Katko and Clement Valla, Yelling at a Wall: Textron Eat Shreds, 2008.
Plantarchy.
25 The trope of consumption—where new media artworks are seen to consume
their own literary (corporal) substance—has been put forward by Christopher
Funkhouser in a paper that goes so far as to cast it in terms of cannibalism.
Christopher T. Funkhouser, “Le(s) Mange Texte(s): Creative Cannibalism
and Digital Poetry,” in E-Poetry 2007 (Paris: Université Paris8, 2007).
Roberto Simanowski develops this critical approach as one aspect of his
analysis of digital aesthetics, especially the fate of literature in digital art
practice where he, to simplify, sees this consumption as reducing—at least
in terms of the literary—the significance and affect of works that are (self-)
identified as digital literature. Roberto Simanowski, “Digital Anthropophagy:
Refashioning Words as Image, Sound and Action,” Leonardo 43, no. 2
(2010): 159–163.
26 Caleb Larsen, Whose Life Is It Anyway? 2008.
27 http://twitter.com/jennyholzer. (It’s extraordinary, reviewing and reissuing
this 2008 essay in 2017, that I felt compelled to describe “what Twitter is”
when it is now an institution by means of which a US president may execute
policy. It is also extraordinary that Larsen produced, essentially, one of the first
chatbots, long before they achieved any kind of currency.)
28 Derrida, “Paper or Me, You Know …,” 46. Emphasis in the original.
29 I know how to make it work (more or less) but I don’t know how it works. So
I don’t know, I know less than ever, “who it is” who goes there. Not knowing,
in this case, is a distinctive trait, one that does not apply with pens or with
typewriters either. With pens and typewriters, you think you know how it
works, how “it responds.” Whereas, with computers, even if people know how
to use them up to a point, they rarely know, intuitively and without thinking—
at any rate, I don’t know—how the internal demon of the apparatus works.
What rules it obeys. This secret with no mystery frequently marks our
dependence in relation to many instruments of modern technology. Derrida,
“The Word Processor,” 23.
258 NOTES
Chapter 11
1 This statement is not equivalent to David Golumbia’s reading of
computationalism in so far as he suggests that individualism and Western
neoliberalism have been underwritten by computationalist assertions that
the mind and human relations generally may be exhaustively modeled by
computational mechanisms or may be computational in themselves. However,
I accord with Golumbia in suggesting that the kind of relationships that
the network promotes, structurally, do tend to reinforce individualist and
liberal sensibilities. David Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
2 See the discussion of data vs. capta below, as well as note 19.
3 “Big Software” is, as far as I am aware, my own coinage. “Big data” retains
the gloss of digital utopianism since it appears, as do search engines’ indexes,
to promise universal accessibility and use, while in fact, as the tenor of this
chapter indicates, “big data” is only properly accessible on terms from the
servers of Big Software where it has been accumulated and processed.
4 McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2004).
5 Apart from Wark and Golumbia, who do not yet explicitly address, in
particular, the implication of Facebook’s vectoralist predominance, particularly
welcome to and formative of this kind of critical discussion is: Geert
Lovink, Networks without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media (Cambridge:
Polity, 2011). See also: Roberto Simanowski, ed. Digital Humanities and
Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics, and Literacy,
Fibreculture Books (London: Open Humanities Press, 2016).
6 As I say, I select these organizations as exemplary. The vectoralist practices
critiqued here are widely prevalent in companies both new and long-standing:
Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and so on, and all the fast-emerging social
networking enclosures.
7 Google’s own rendition of its corporate history is now (accessed January,
2013) available online at http://www.google.com/about/company/. AdWords,
still the backbone of Google revenue, was introduced in 2000.
8 Significantly, from the point of view of institutional distinction, Wikipedia is
operated by a non-profit charitable foundation, the Wikimedia Foundation.
9 Of course, there are problems such as the robotic generation of editorial events
(spam), and the problematic treatment of subjects and entities who may also
present themselves as peers, although they have—as for example a user who is
also the subject of an article—non-negotiable proper interests in the material
to be read. Golumbia briefly cites Wikipedia as contrastively exemplary
of a networked service promoting genuine, as opposed to ostensible,
democratization. Golumbia, 26.
10 http://www.facebook.com/legal/terms (accessed August 3, 2017).
11 “On April Fools’ Day in 2004, we launched Gmail.” http://www.google.com/
about/company/ (accessed January, 2013). I am suggesting that this wasn’t
about email and it wasn’t even primarily about the generation of screen real
estate for ads (see below); it was about accounts, and the ability to associate
NOTES 259
data gathered from search and other services with the representation of human
entities within an enclosure for big data. If this is correct, 2004 becomes the
year of the advent of “big data” from my perspective, and the date for the
advent of self-conscious vectoralist enclosures.
12 The coordination of human and posthuman desire may make it appear that
something is added to human desire in this context, but it is salutary to
consider the possibility that posthuman desire already is or may become a
constrained and narrowed formation constituted by what is representable in
computational systems or, perhaps more specifically, by particular regimes of
computation. Golumbia is pessimistic in this regard.
13 It is clear that the net artist Constant Dullaart is sensitive to certain
implications of such agreements, and if you are looking for a somewhat more
entertaining and edifying way to familiarize yourself with Google’s TOS, I
recommend a visit to http://constantdullaart.com/TOS/ (accessed August 3,
2017). I am grateful to Clement Valla for introducing me to this work by
Dullaart.
14 An ocean of legalese inserts itself into the interstices of getting and
spending—warranties and disclaimers in the packaging of appliances, and so
on. However, it seems to be only since the advent of Big Software that we,
remarkably frequently, make active gestures of agreement to terms: a click, a
press of the (default) return key. We make these gestures more frequently and
more actively but, it seems to me, no less unthinkingly.
15 http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/ (accessed August 3, 2017).
16 The lines and subsequent quotations in the same style are from a piece that
accompanied the online publication of this essay: John Cayley, “Pentameters
toward the Dissolution of Certain Vectoralist Relations,” Amodern 2
(2013): n.p.
17 The university is under a great deal of pressure in this regard. Many
universities have opted to use Gmail for the purposes of correspondence,
for example, and the relationship of this correspondence to the university
is institutionally implicated. Another, very different, institution comes to be
involved and the question of how these distinct institutions interrelate will
not go away. Now also, social media (Facebook) enters the scene as a further
channel of correspondence and communication for members of the university.
Next, social media models are applied to pedagogical tools and affordances.
But perhaps most tellingly and corrosively, the advent of Online Learning,
MOOCs, and commercial organizations, like Coursera and Udacity already
challenge the university to adopt their services in a manner that may prove to
be inimical to fundamental aspects of its institutional mission, particularly as
a site of independent research, as both problematic and necessary complement
to teaching and pedagogical dissemination.
18 Wark; “The Vectoralist Class,” Supercommunity 84 (2015): n.p.
19 “Data” has been prevalent for decades as indicative of the raw material of
research. It seems particularly important now to consider what is and is not
data. Strictly, data means “that which is given” as evidence of the world.
However, the tools we use to take what the world gives may overdetermine
the material we are able to gather. Arguably, the computational regime is
overdetermined in a number of respects. It can only take as putative data
260 NOTES
what can be represented in terms of discrete symbolic elements, and it will

tend to favor quantitative accumulation and analysis. Following Joanna
Drucker, I prefer to use “capta,” for what has been able to be “taken,”
when referring to the raw material collected and processed by networked
services or indeed by the regime of computation in general. “A fundamental
prejudice, I suggest, is introduced by conceiving of data within any humanistic
interpretative frame on a conventional, uncritical, statistical basis. Few social
scientists would proceed this way, and the abandonment of interpretation
in favor of a naïve approach to statistical certain[t]y [online: “certainly”]
skews the game from the outset in favor of a belief that data is intrinsically
quantitative—self-evident, value neutral, and observer-independent. This belief
excludes the possibilities of conceiving data as qualitative, co-dependently
constituted—in other words, of recognizing that all data is capta.” Johanna
Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” Digital Humanities
Quarterly 5, no. 1 (2011): n.p. The distinction is fundamentally important
and it is remarkable to consider that this seems to be the first time that it has
been clarified for the era of so-called Digital Humanities. In the discourse
of phenomenology, the understanding of data is carefully discussed, but—in
a quick review—I have found only two relevant earlier references to the
distinction as proposed by Drucker. I think these are worth citing in the
circumstances. Christopher Chippindale, “Capta and Data: On the True
Nature of Archaeological Information,” American Antiquity 65, no. 4
(2000): 605–612; Salvatore Russo, “Data vs. Capta or Sumpta,” American
Psychologist 12, no. 5 (1957): 283–284. The latter is a brief review notice.
20 Robert Darnton, “Google’s Loss: The Public’s Gain,” The New York Review of
Books LVII, no. 7 (April 28, 2011): 10–12.
21 This may not be entirely clear. The results contain language, words, that
were abjected by a human writer. As with all language, the symbolic aspect
of language renders an orthothetic (direct/proper indication/pointing)
relationship between the abjected words and these “same” words that
appear in the results. The results are made, in part, of words that belong to,
are proper to, the (typically) human writer who has read them abjectly and
written them into the maw of the search engine. See below, the chapter’s
concluding paragraphs, for the special and highly implicated case, when
this appropriation of language, proper to a human writer, is applied to the
algorithmic generation of advertisements.
22 A curated version of this facility has been provided by Google in the guise
of its Ngram Viewer, now moved from Google Labs and associated with the
Google Books project at http://books.google.com/ngrams/. “Ngrams” are
sequences of words (considered as linguistic tokens) of various lengths (n may
range from 2 to 5 to n). Linguistic corpora, in this case Google Books, may be
processed so as to provide the relative frequencies for occurrences of ngrams,
and this information may be further processed so as to offer up linguistic and
cultural insights. See: Michel et al. There are also, of course, opportunities for
literary aesthetic practice, for example the author’s collaboration with Daniel
C. Howe: Cayley and Howe. See also: John Cayley, “N-gram,” in The John
Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, and
Benjamin J. Robertson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
NOTES 261
23 Language, arguably, exemplifies a different relation between material as data

and material as capta. Language is, as it were, always already abstracted
from specific embodiment, nonetheless retaining its inalienable relation to the
embodied world as a function of the requirement that it be read in order to
exist. Language is easy to capture but difficult to read.
24 Google’s predominance is founded on a historical (singular) circumstance in
at least this respect: as it came to prominence, the raw material that it indexed
was, basically, inscribed by human agencies. This is, clearly, no longer the case.
On some estimates, more than half of the material inscribed on the surface of
the network is generated by software rather than human authors and writers
(see: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/report-51-of-web-site-traffic-is-non-
human-and-mostly-malicious/2201; and the source: http://www.incapsula.
com/news/news-incapsula-press-releases/item/178-incapsula-reveals-31-of-
website-traffic-can-harm-your-business). Considerations of spam, algorithmic
text, and website (link farm) generation—of the “dark net” in general—
significantly complicate the arguments set out here, while the overall tendency
of these argument remains, I would maintain, coherent.
25 Which is, see above, brought into being by readers and reading. This should
cause us even greater concern since, as reading changes, the proper materiality
(ontological substance) of writing changes. If readers read other things, then
more of these other things exist as compared to those that might otherwise
have existed as a function of having been read.
26 This is somewhat of a theme for: Golumbia.
27 As fundamental elements of language, these abstractions come into existence
and become entities as they are read or in relation to their readability. See
above.
28 http://www.google.com/about/company/ (accessed August 3, 2017).
29 See note 19.
30 TrackMeNot by Daniel C. Howe and Helen Nissenbaum is an artistic-critical
address to precisely these issues. Daniel C. Howe and Helen Nissenbaum,
TrackMeNot, 2008.
31 I am referring to the now commonly encountered presentation of textual
advertisements in marginal spaces associated with web-based access to
Google’s Gmail. Google’s algorithms “read” key words in the bodies of
email messages and generate ads, often including these keywords in the copy,
assuming an implicated interest in these terms on the part of the human
authors of the email messages. I write an email to my mother at Christmas and
I am presented with advertisements for seasonal gifts appropriate for mothers.
32 Jason Huff and Mimi Cabell’s American Psycho project offers an aestheticized
critique of this circumstance. The artists sent the entire text of Brett Easton
Ellis’ American Psycho between email accounts, page by page, noting the
Google-generated advertisements that were triggered by words and phrases
in Easton Ellis’ text. They then printed a book with only the traces of these
advertisements in the place of the text. See: Jason Huff, Mimi Cabell, and Brett
Easton Ellis, American Psycho, 2010.
33 See the opening of the chapter above. In case this is not clear, these are
statements associated with a philosophy of language and literary aesthetic
262 NOTES
practice, specifically a theory of linguistic ontology that recognizes the coming

into being of language as it is read.
34 Kashmir Hill, “Facebook Will Be Using Your Face in ‘Sponsored Stories’ Ads
(and There’s No Opting Out),” Forbes 2011.
Chapter 12
1 See “The Gravity of the Leaf” in this volume and John Cayley, “The Gravity
of the Leaf: Phenomenologies of Literary Inscription in Media-Constituted
Diegetic Worlds,” in Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary
Structures, Interfaces and Genres, ed. Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer,
Media Upheavals (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010).
2 This association with particular physical media is conventional and a function
of human capabilities. It is also conservative: language finds it difficult to be
deployed in other physical media, although in principle this would be possible.
Vilém Flusser seemed to propose that linguistic symbolic practice will migrate
to the “technical image.” Perhaps it’s on its way, but very slowly. Natural
sign languages are, to my mind, the only instances of commensurate human
language systems that are deployed in another physical medium—that of
spatialized gesture.
3 One of the best expositions of this position that I know is implicit throughout
the work of Derrida and set out fairly clearly in Derrida, “The Book to Come.”
4 I hope that this usage of “readability” will become clearer as the chapter
elaborates. In art practical research, my collaborator Daniel C. Howe and I
are exploring aspects of readability and the culture of human reading through
Cayley and Howe.
5 In particular, this chapter follows on from thinking in “The Code Is Not the
Text,” included in this volume and at John Cayley, “The Code Is Not the Text
(Unless It Is the Text),” Electronic Book Review (2002): n.p.
6 Saying that it is “easier” to read glosses over a wide range of ways in which
the “ease” of this facility may be generated: through choice of reserved words
and operators, through the deployment of more familiar syntax, etc. etc.
7 I use “privileged” to indicate the kind of special and necessary relationship
between low-level (machine) codes and particular hardware configurations.
8 These works are referred to and discussed using a range of terms by critics
of Baldessari’s work. “Composite photoworks” is from: Bruggen, 131 ff.,
184.
9 This consideration of virtual linguistic artifacts in a visual field has many
fascinating special cases that it is impossible to go into here in any detail.
Consider the status of the title on the cover of the (second) book in 2a. It
is readable and also, thus, “language-as-such,” but it is also comfortably,
diegetically part of the image-of-a-book-cover and so does not exemplify the
diegetic break that language, I claim, always registers. There are the cases of
film titling; (usually failed) attempts to introduce readable language into film
and video; and subtitles that are “invisible” despite the fact they usually also
embody a ghastly, tasteless disregard (without evoking the obvious necessary
NOTES 263
diegetic break between one language and another) for the composition of the
cinematic frame. The historian of East Asian art Robert Harrist has written
about the representation of writing and writing itself, inspiring some of my
thinking in: Harrist Jr.
10 Instances from “Monoclonal Microphone” were first published, thanks to its
editor, Benny Lichtner, with a somewhat extended description of the process
in: John Cayley, “From: Writing to Be Found,” adj noun, Spring 2011. This
work was built using Processing (http:processing.org), and the RiTa natural
language processing library by Daniel C. Howe (http://www.rednoise.org/
rita/).
11 The discussion, below, of our last example from distinctly computational
digital language art refers to an exemplary and executable instance of such
criticism.
12 Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland, Sea and Spar Between, 2010. In
Dear Navigator, SAIC, Chicago.
13 Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland “Cut to Fit the Tool-Spun Course:
Discussing Creative Code in Comments,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7, no.
1 (2013).
14 Stephanie Strickland, V—WaveSon.nets. V—losing l’una, Penguin Poets (New
York: Penguin, 2002); Stephanie Strickland, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, and
Paul Ryan. Slippingglimpse. 2007. http://slippingglimpse.org (accessed August
13, 2017).
15 The series of works I am thinking is: Nick Montfort, ppg256 series: Perl
Poetry Generators in 256 characters. 2008-ongoing. http://nickm.com/poems/
ppg256.html (accessed August 13, 2017).
16 Shelley Jackson, Skin: A Story Published on the Skin of 2095 Volunteers. 2003.
http://ineradicablestain.com/skindex.html (accessed August 3, 2017).
Chapter 13
1 The conference took place from March 4 to 5, 2016, and was organized by
Sydney Skybetter. Website, http://www.choreotech.com (accessed March 20,
2016).
2 This reference to and usage of pharmakon is inspired by the critical thought
of Bernard Stiegler. See, among many other references: Bernard Stiegler,
For a New Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge: Polity, 2010); What
Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology, trans. Daniel Ross, English ed.
(Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013).
3 While digitization might be used for both senses, digitalization may also be
deployed to indicate, generally, institutional and social reconfiguration and
accommodation to digital culture and networked computation, whereas
digitization may have a constrained sense: the encoded representation of
information about the world in digital form.
4 John Cayley, “Terms of Reference & Vectoralist Transgressions: Situating
Certain Literary Transactions over Networked Services,” Amodern 2 (2013):
n.p.; “Pentameters toward the Dissolution of Certain Vectoralist Relations.”
264 NOTES
5 John Cayley, The Listeners. 2015. Custom software, aurally accessible

linguistic compositions, and “skill” for the Amazon Echo’s “Alexa” using the
Alexa Skills Kit. http://programmatology.shadoof.net/?thelisteners (accessed
March 20, 2016); John Cayley, “The Listeners: An Instance of Aurature,”
Cream City Review 40, no. 2 (2016): 172–187; John Cayley, “Aurature at the
End(s) of Electronic Literature,” Electronic Book Review (2017): n.p.
6 “Terms of Reference & Vectoralist Transgressions: Situating Certain Literary
Transactions over Networked Services.” Included in this volume.
7 It was Patrick Corbin, a prominent dance artist and professor of
Contemporary Dance at the Kaufman School of Dance, University of Southern
California, who suggested this term.
8 Vilém Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future? trans. Nancy Ann Roth, Electronic
Mediations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Into the
Universe of Technical Images, trans. Nancy Ann Roth, Electronic Mediations
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
9 James Bridle is credited with coining the term, for which there is a Wikipedia
entry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Aesthetic (accessed March 20, 2016),
leading to a number of manifestations by Bridle, including, James Bridle,
“The New Aesthetic: Waving at the Machines.” http://booktwo.org/notebook/
waving-at-machines/ (accessed March 20, 2016).
10 See “The Gravity of the Leaf” in this volume, and: Cayley, “The Gravity of the
Leaf: Phenomenologies of Literary Inscription in Media-Constituted Diegetic
Worlds.”
11 Clement Valla, Postcards from Google Earth. 2010. http://www.postcards-
from-google-earth.com (accessed 20 March, 2016); Curt Cloninger,
“Manifesto for a Theory of the ‘New Aesthetic’,” Mute 3, no. 4 (2013): 16–27.
12 In terms of the type of analysis that I am outlining here, Valla’s project
exemplifies another media-constituted diegetic break that is interesting,
although less immediately important for our argument. This is the break
between, as it were, the diegesis of the snapshot or postcard and that of the
mapping system that is represented by Google Earth. The break is, of course,
visually manifested by the framing of the postcards themselves, breaking them
out of the map and its transformations. His insightful, aestheticized exposure
of the contrasting ways that human participants relate to these two diegetic
worlds and act with and within them is, of course, an important impetus for
Valla’s project.
13 For subsequent projects, Valla has contextualized his process in terms of
photogrammetry, a pre-computational analytic practice of photography
and clearly also productive of symbolic image in the terms set out here:
Clement Valla, Surface Proxy (Paris: XPO Gallery, 2015). In the Surface
Proxy catalogue cited, see, especially, the Notes on pp. 79–94. This catalog is
available in PDF form at http://clementvalla.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/
clement_valla_surface_proxy_web.pdf (accessed March 26, 2016).
14 See “Reading and Giving” in this volume and: John Cayley, “Reading and
Giving—Voice and Language,” Performance Research 18, no. 5 (2013): 10–19.
15 As language, these high-order breaks, as we will see, may be discovered by
close reading. They may also, of course, be explicitly marked by punctuation—
whether this be more or less conventional punctuation or distinctly
NOTES 265
paralinguistic. For example, within the scope of graphic inscription and

typography, such a break could be marked by a change of font or a change of
a single font’s color. These marks, however, are at best paralinguistic; they are
distinctions inscribed into the material support of the language rather than
into the language as such.
When it comes to language in aurality—as human or humanoid voice—
the situation becomes more complex because we cannot (yet) conceive of the
voice that is not marked by human individuality. This implies that whatever
a voice inscribes is, minimally, within the diegetic scope of this individuality.
If an apparent individual is subject to symbolic process for the production of
their language, would this not break their individuality and require a change
of voice (perhaps expressed as distinct intonation or accent—think also of
acting, drama, and the complexities that this field of aesthetic practice would
further introduce)? These are questions—somewhat beyond the present scope
of this chapter—that become crucial since the advent of distributed entities that
speak and listen—like Siri, Cortana, Google Now, Watson, and Alexa, all of
which are literally embodied as transactive synthetic language. The language
of these entities is symbolic image in the terms delineated here. It is a synthesis
of conventional linguistic image and language-generative symbolic process.
Not only are the broken diegeses of this language disguised by their inevitable
coincidence with differences that constitute language as such, synthetic language
in aurality must also be wrapped within one of the definitive indications of
human embodiment, an individual voice. This renders the implicated symbolic
processes compelling in so far as they acquire a compelling relationship with
embodied humanity. The resultant voices are not, by the way, necessarily
“uncanny” (disturbingly human-seeming non-human). They are something more
troubling than that. They are signs of the advent of a new kind of transactive
being that is able to share our language-making and language-reading.
16 The “language” of “formal languages” is within quote marks here because I
would prefer to reserve “language” for natural human language. Otherwise,
the use of “language” is inflated, as Derrida pointed out long ago: Derrida,
Of Grammatology, 6 ff. Formal “languages” are exhaustively describable in
structuralist terms such as sign, grammar, difference—structure, math, logic.
The poststructuralist critique, especially as emerging from Jacques Derrida’s
grammatology, underlies my thinking throughout, where, for example,
difference must be—and must also be superseded/supplemented/erased by—
différance, but only in so far as this is readable as generative of those kinds of
meaning that are vital for human animals.
17 There is, of course, a reference to long-standing and ongoing discussions of
the interrelationship of code and text in, especially, the field of electronic
writing, digital literature, and so on. The deliberate, aesthetically or
conceptually motivated, synthesis of literal code and text is and will continue
to be practiced—notable practitioners: Mez Breeze, Talan Memmott, Alan
Sondheim, the last of whom is credited with a term for this practice, namely
“codework”: Alan Sondheim, “Introduction: Codework,” American Book
Review 22, no. 6 (2001): 1, 4. The author has made his own contribution to
the debate; see “The Code Is Not the Text” in this volume and: Cayley, “The
Code Is Not the Text (Unless It Is the Text).”
266 NOTES
As an example of a highly interesting and conceptually superlative form

of the practice, I would like to cite William P. Hicks Esopo project: William
P. Hicks, Email, March 29, 2016. Hicks’s approach is to specify formal
languages—ideally languages that are Turing complete; that is, languages that
are capable, in principle, of computing anything computable—on the basis of
the selected features of existing natural linguistic textual forms. For such an
approach, aspects of punctuation—particularly actual punctuation “marks”
and also the significant arrangement of “white space” such as lineation,
spacing, and indentation—are crucial, but selected textual “tokens”—typically
to be defined as “reserved words”—will also figure in the specification.
The goal of a particular constituent language within this project might be,
for example, to implement a specification that will allow any text that is
formatted according to genre conventions or, indeed, any text at all, to be
successfully compiled into a machine language executable. In other words,
the text is rendered interpretable—by the specification—as the “high level”
source code of a program that will compile and run on some arbitrary
hardware platform. Hicks has, indeed, made a specification that will allow
the compilation of any text, but he has also specified an inherently more
interesting language, “Emily,” that is able to interpret and compile any of the
poems of Emily Dickinson, and thus also, by definition, any original poems
that follow the textual and poetic conventions of Dickinson’s work.
Success in the compilation of a text is a necessary condition for it to be
considered as conforming to an Esopo language specification, but Hicks’s
proposal is that there are expressive and aesthetic potentialities in refined
instances of the practice. A language that allows any text to be compiled must
allow that the vast majority of texts will compile as programs that do little
more than nothing. Most of them will be instances of “Hello World,” one
imagines. Hicks, however, writes that “Emily” compiles Dickinson poems as
“non-trivial algorithms.” Hicks conceives of a constrained writing practice—
self-reflexive with regard to its own structures, which are implemented as an
Esopo—that would bring into existence texts that do something significant
and affective in the worlds of both human reading and machinic computation.
To quote Hicks himself, “Some [Esopo languages] are designed to compile
almost any text they receive as input, while others demand strict adherence to
certain formal rules. Other languages are designed not so much to encourage
production of new algorithmically-engaged text as to draw attention to the
structure of existing work.” Ibid.
18 A good way into Montfort’s work is: Nick Montfort, #! [Shebang] (Denver:
Counterpath, 2014). The author has also written a review essay of this book
that deals with a number of related issues in the theory and practice of digital
language art, computational poetics, and the poetics of computation. John
Cayley, “Poetry and Stuff: A Review of #!” Electronic Book Review (2015):
n.p.
19 Montfort, ppg256 series: Perl Poetry Generators in 256 characters.
20 John Cayley, Image Generation: A Reader (London: Veer Books, 2015), 34–57,
138–139.
21 Cayley and Howe.
22 Cayley, Image Generation: A Reader, 35.
NOTES 267
23 Personal email communication, March 21, 2016. Primary Source was first
publicly exhibited at the “Proxy” curatorial space, Providence, RI, March–
April, 2015 as part of a group show entitled “Maximum Sideline: Postscript.”
Capone self-published a print-on-demand artist’s book/chapbook version to
coincide with the installation. On-demand print copies of this book may be
ordered from the following URL: http://www.lulu.com/shop/francesca-capone/
primary-source/paperback/product-22217179.html (accessed March 26,
2016). Both video and PDF versions of the work were subsequently published
online by Gaus PDF (http:/gaus-pdf.com), PDF: http://www.gauss-pdf.com/
post/121599676480/gpdf177gpdfe016-1-francesca-capone-primary, and
video: http://www.gauss-pdf.com/post/121599892473/gpdf177gpdfe016-2-
francesca-capone-primary. Francesca Capone, Primary Source (Providence,
RI: Self-published artist’s book; also available online from Gauss PDF, 2015).
Remarks following on in the main text are adapted from an afterword that the
author wrote for Capone’s chapbook.
Chapter 14
1 Derrida, Of Grammatology.
2 James R. Hurford, The Origins of Grammar, Language in the Light of
Evolution (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); The Origins
of Language: A Slim Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
3 Ibid.
4 Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human
Invention (New York: Viking, 2009).
5 Derrida, Of Grammatology; Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy;
What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology; “Digital Knowledge,
Obsessive Computing, Short-Termism and Need for a Negentropic Web,” in
Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture,
Aesthetics, and Literacy, ed. Roberto Simanowski (London: Open Humanities
Press, 2016).
6 Roberto Pieraccini, The Voice in the Machine: Building Computers That
Understand Speech (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
7 N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Prologue.’ In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies
in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999), xi–xiv.
8 V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav
Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge and London: Seminar Press, 1973);
Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Denise Riley, The Force of Language, Language,
Discourse, Society (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
9 Matthew Rubery, The Untold Story of the Talking Book (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2016).
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Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2004.
Wark, McKenzie. “The Vectoralist Class.” Supercommunity 84 (2015). http://
supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-vectoralist-class/ (accessed August 13,
2017).
Watts, Jonathan. “China’s Internet Crackdown Forced Google Retreat.” The
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Williams, Emmett. Selected Shorter Poems 1950–1970. New York: New Directions,
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Williams, Emmett. A Valentine for Noël: Four Variations on a Scheme. Stuttgart
and London: Editions Hanjörg Mayer, 1973.
INDEX
Aarseth, Espen 7, 74–5, 108 aurality ix–x, 211, 216–20, 265 n.15
analysis of textuality 76 domain of 217
Acker, Kathy 61, 141, 251 n.16 aurature 4, 12, 219–20
acrostics 18, 20–1, 36 authorial integrity 70, 76, 196
Actual Possession of the World authorial originality 69, 137–8, 250
(Cayley) 27–8 n.13
advertising 139, 141, 179, 181–2, 188, authoring packages 35
196 authoritarian/authoritative 70, 79
reconfiguration of 167 automatic speech recognition 73, 200,
aesthetic responsibilities 4, 7, 10–12 216, 218–19
affordances. See digital affordances socialization of 220
aleatory procedure 18, 21, 26–7, 71. automatic voice recognition. See
See also chance operations automatic speech recognition
Alexa Voice Services (AVS) 218 avant-garde 57, 155, 231 n.8
algorithm(s) 4–5, 12, 25, 36, 50, 110, literary 72, 144
167, 175, 178–9, 182, 191, 209, writing 61
219 AVS. See Alexa Voice Services (AVS)
of text generators 49
algorithmic processes 4, 12, 58, 88, Baldessari, John 125, 126, 189–90
130, 156, 176, 179–81, 187, Barthes, Roland 101, 123, 124, 223
191, 203–5, 207, 217 n.13, 244 n.15
alphabet 47 Bass, Saul 81–3, 85, 93
alphabetic systems of inscription 178 Baudrillard, Jean 79
Amazon 11 Beckett, Samuel 142–3, 252 n.19
Amazon Echo 218 Bernstein, Charles 33–4, 57
anticipatory plagiarism/plagiarists 58, big data 5, 11, 166–7, 176–8, 180,
223 n.9 197, 200–1
aporia 150, 155 bigram(s) 254 n.22. See also ngram(s)
aesthetic 150 Big Software 11, 167, 170, 171, 173,
artificial intelligence(s) 5, 140, 216, 219 175
artistic formalism 67 architecture 200, 204
artistic media 7, 17, 36, 136, 185 circumstances of 176
Art & Language 122, 157 enclosing vectors 167–8
ASCII art 62–3 institutional relations with 177
“Asymmetries” (Mac Low) 20 processes 181
atomism 96 services 174
audiobook(s) 220 vectoralist enclosures of 176
augmented reality 209 bilingualism 62
INDEX 283
book 54, 69, 71, 155, 162, 170, 220 code 8, 35, 40–1, 53, 56–60, 68, 95–7,
to come, the 152–3 114, 187–8, 230 n.5
definition of 110 connotation and 124
digitized 174 continuing operation of 96
end of the 155 creative processes of 71, 77, 194
format 47 hierarchies of 96, 101
institutions of 156 hypertext and 106
literature 149, 156 language and 62, 96, 187–8
practices of writing constrained by language of 61–2, 100
80 linguistic material from 62
as program(s) 80 power of 56, 59–60, 100, 113, 231
Book Unbound (Cayley) 27 n.10
Bootz, Philippe 103, 110, 232 n.22, proper ontology of 187
239 n.28 provisional categories of 99
theory of 103 punctuation and 102–3
breaking media 119, 121–2 role of 36
Burroughs, William S. 27, 54, 57, 61 source code 56
“byte-sized” alphabet 47 structures of 54, 65
time and 112–14
Cage, John 36, 57, 58, 86 usages of 61–2, 100
calligram(s) 127, 244 n.14 ways to write 98–102
Capone, Francesca 208, 210 the work itself as 96, 194–5
capta 173–4, 176, 178–81, 222 n.8, writers’ relationship to 35, 40–1, 68
259–60 n.19, 261 n.23 code-as-text 53–4, 60, 62, 96, 265–6
catastrophic n.17
as characterizing grammalepsy 3, code-infected writing/interface text
123, 189–91, 193, 214–15 99–100, 102
Cave (immersive VR device) 121–2, codework 8, 58–64, 95–6, 98–100, 102
126, 130, 131 reassessment of 58
description of 117 codex 31, 47, 69, 73
graphics 119 codexspace 16, 67–70
immersive visual space of 119 pure literacy of 75–6
language in 132 collocational procedure 24–7, 227–8
objects in 130 n.1, 233–4 n.1
software 89–90 collocations 21–2, 22–5, 27. See also
3D space of 92 Indra’s Net II
user 116–17 Collocations (Cayley) 24–5
version of Lens 92 commands (in computation) 34–5, 37,
walls as complex surfaces 88–93 56, 231 n.12
working in 118 complex surface(s) 9, 80–7, 93, 96,
chance operations 21, 27, 31. See also 185
aleatory procedure for linguistic inscription 185
Chinese Buddhism 20, 26 symbolic on 93
Chrisley, Ron 135 textuality of 93
Christie, John 27 composite photoworks 124–5, 189
Cloninger, Curt 202 compositional media 7, 11, 48, 53, 59,
“cloud” (as in networked computation) 89, 213
170, 218–19 potential use of 59
284 INDEX
computation(al) 186–7, 199–201, literary developments in 68

212–13, 216 literary potential 16, 31
information processing 34 poetics 30, 36, 66–77
software devices, computational readability of 30
194 technologies of 16, 68, 76
computer(s) 33–4, 71 text generation 27
-based systems 15–16, 31, 68
-controlled installation 16, 24 Danielewski, Mark 113, 241 n.47
development of 34 data 259–60 n.19. See also big data;
information processing by 33 capta
languages 187 deconstruction 147–8
media 35 delivery media 15–17, 48, 50, 53,
as medium 33 58–9, 67–8, 71–4, 89, 97–8, 185
systems, characteristics of 36 Derrida, Jacques 7–8, 49, 129, 148,
computing services 172–3 152–4, 162, 214–15, 241–2 n.1,
conceptual art 122, 156–7 265 n.16
conceptual poetry/poetics. See poetic(s) Dickinson, Emily 194, 266 n.17
concrete poetry/poetics. See poetic(s) diegesis 124–7, 186, 202, 245 n.24,
“Conference for Research on 246 n.32
Choreographic Interfaces” media-constituted (see media-
(CRCI) 199–200 constituted diegesis)
configuration 203–4 diegetic worlds. See media-constituted
control(s) 35–6 (diegetic) worlds
structures 56–7 digital affordances 10–11, 134, 166,
“cool” 150, 152–3, 155–6, 160–2 168, 172, 195, 200, 212–13,
copyright 111, 143, 174, 178, 182 216, 219–20
Cramer, Florian 56–60, 231 n.11 digitalization 4, 11, 200, 212–15
creative plagiarism 47 potentialities of 214–15
critical theory (actualized by digital language. See also language
programmable media) 68–9 no ontological distinction with
Critical Theory (Cayley) 24 respect to language 213–14
cultural architecture 199–200, 204, digital literature 151. See also literature
208 digital media 4, 7–8, 10–12, 47, 101,
cultural authority. See literature 119, 124, 140, 157, 160–1, 210
cultural practice(s)/production 49, 111, language art in 211–13
115, 120, 126, 139, 147, 156, language-driven 156
162, 199, 210 linguistic practice in 186
digitalization of 47, 53–4 promises and perils of 199
paradigms of 173 writing and 117, 151 (see also
reconfiguration of 152 “writing digital media”)
cultural value 177, 210 digital mediation 8, 10, 172–3
sources of 64 digital poetics 231 n.16. See also
culture of information (Liu) 150 poetic(s)
cyberspace 15–17, 34, 54, 70, 77 potential forms for 61–2
consensual hallucination of 54 digital (mediation of) textuality 171
cybertext 7–8, 16, 66–77. See also digitization 138, 212–13, 263 n.3. See
Indra’s Net also digital media
creation 30 of cultural objects 56
INDEX 285
linguistic artifacts, relationship with Florio, John 134

212–13 Flusser, Vilém 201, 262 n.2
of linguistic sound 218–19 formalism 57
of painting 120–1 engaged 79
perception, relationship with Foucault, Michel 118, 122, 127, 128,
213–14 244 n.14
of sound as opposed to language-as- From Lexia to Perplexia (Memmott)
aurality 217–18 60, 241 n.47
two-stage process of (for language-
as-aurality) 218 Genette, Gérard 102
of typography 213 gesture (and grammalepsis) 2–3, 217
and writing (as intrinsically digital) Gibson, William 54–5
47, 219 Glazier, Loss Pequeño 61–2, 99
docuverse (Nelson) 108–10 glitch 203–5
dramatic writing 211, 265 n.15 aesthetics 203
Drucker, Joanna 58, 260 n.19 Gmail, as the inauguration of stable
(trackable) network identity 169
Eastgate Systems 222 n.3, 235 n.16 Golden Lion (Cayley) 22, 25–6
ebooks 220 Good, Octavio 209
edge of chaos 135–7, 248 n.6 “Good Search” 169
electracy (Ulmer) 48–9 Google 11, 133–42, 158, 168, 171–2,
“electric literature” 148 180, 181, 192, 204
electronic literature ix–x, 4, 7, 148–57, Books 174, 178, 191
159–61, 173, 214, 216 corpus (Google search considered
electronic textuality 97–8 as) 133, 136–8, 144, 248 n.1
embodied language 162–3. See also Earth 203
language “index of reference” (Google
epoché 2 considered as) 138
“epoetry” 149 and popular culture 139–40
ergodic textuality/literature 74, 108, Terms of Service 252 n.18
239 n.29 Googlization 139, 222 n.8
expressive programming 156–8, 160–1 grammalepsis/grammalepsy 1–13, 16,
18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 30, 215, 221
Facebook 11, 168–9, 181 n.2
Fazang, Chinese Huayan Buddhist inevitability of 214
monk (643-712) 26 grammaleptic reading 2–3, 10, 214,
feedback (cybernetic, esp. Hayles) 54, 216–19
71, 149, 159, 255 n.4 grammatology 2, 4, 7–8, 162, 229 n.5,
fiction 8, 54, 155, 211 265 n.16
figuration 126, 201, 203 applied 75
figurative systems 203 Gu Cheng 26–7
filmic naturalism 86. See also Gysin, Brion 27
photographic naturalism
film titling 81–2, 84, 112 A Hacker Manifesto (Wark) 167
flickering signification/signifier 65–6, Hayles, N. Katherine 54, 55–6, 65, 95,
98, 100–1 97–8, 108, 113, 148, 156, 157,
“floating signification” (Lacan) 58, 65, 159–60, 230 n.6
101 flickering signifier 58–9, 100–1
286 INDEX
HCI. See human-computer interface gestures of 2

(HCI) graphic 118–19, 121, 205–6
Heidegger, Martin 233 n.1 linguistic 188
hologograms/hologography 20–1, 224 (non-)surfaces of 9, 83, 90–1, 130–1
n.20 intellectual property, conceptions of
holographic text 50 178
holography 20, 225 n.22 interactivity 73–4, 76–7
Holzer, Jenny 160 interface text 59–60, 101
Howe, Daniel C. 141, 144, 145, 157, signs of 58–9
251 n.16 surface language of 102–3
HTML. See hypertext markup interiority 162–3, 181
language (HTML) internet services, emergence and
Huayan Buddhism 20 development of 167
human-computer interface (HCI) 50, 56 “interpretative user function” (Aarseth)
“human markup language” 60 74–6
human time, restructuring the culture intertextuality 48, 70, 111
of 20, 65, 93, 107, 114 iteration 137–8
HyperCard 20
HyperTalk 63, 64, 233 n.34 Jackson, Shelley 195–6
hypertext 8, 15–17, 19, 30–1, 66–77, Johnston, David Jhave 30
103, 106, 108, 109, 111–12
actual existing 48 Katko, Justin 157, 159, 160
characteristics of 69 Kittler, Friedrich 53, 55
classic link-node models of 104 knowledge workers 150, 161
fiction 155
programming involved in 104 Lacan, Jacques 58, 65, 241 n.1
hypertext markup language (HTML) Landow, George P. 222 n.4, 223 n.13
60, 62–3, 250 n.9 language 62, 80, 171, 188, 205, 215
capabilities of 108 abstraction, linguistic 177–8, 182
hypertextuality 68, 69 art 213–14, 217
hypomnesis 216 and aurality 200, 211, 214–20
hypostatic memory 216 depiction of 190–1, 247 n.39
diegesis, linguistic 186, 191
Illich, Ivan 222 n.6 embodied 162–3
images, symbolic. See symbolic hierarchies of 96
image(s) humans and 1
“index of reference,” Google as 138 materiality of 1–2, 7, 9, 54–5, 58,
Indra’s Net 20–4 64, 81, 95, 101, 120
and visual poetry 22–4 and media 115–16, 118, 119
Indra’s Net II (Cayley) 22, 24 novel mediation of in immersive
Indra’s Net IV (Cayley) 25–6 VR 119
innovative linguistic practices 12, 34, ontology of ix, 2–5, 10, 182, 185–8,
61, 65, 68 190, 205, 213, 215, 221 n.2
inscription 49, 55, 111, 128–32, 153, phenomenology of 55, 97, 119
205–6 and philosophy 1–2, 4, 152, 185,
deferred temporality of 112 215–16, 220
encoded representations of 133 power, linguistic, offered by service
fundamental units of 111–12 providers 176
INDEX 287
representation of 190–1, 247 n.39 of language (see language,

structure, linguistic, levels of 3, 18, materiality of)
57, 205 of writing 165
symbolic image in 205–7 Mathews, Harry 25
technology of 61–2 McCaffery, Steve 58
temporal/temporalization 10, 80–1, media 33, 35, 112, 115–16, 154, 165,
101–2, 106–14, 213–17 200, 212
and time (see language, temporal/ agnosticism 2, 4, 211
temporalization) control structures of 57
voice and 185–97 as culturally instituted system 115
language animals 1–2, 5, 12–13, 15, delivery 7, 11, 15–17, 25, 59, 69,
215–20 71, 97–8
language-driven digital media 155–6 of electronic textuality 98
language-in-aurality 218, 220 language and 116, 119
Larsen, Caleb 160, 163 networked and programmable 4,
“late age of print” (Bolter) 48, 77 49, 53, 95, 108, 112, 148–9
Leaving the City (Cayley and Gu programmability of 49 (see also
Cheng) 25–8 programmable media)
Lens (Cayley) 90–3 programmable (see programmable
linguistic ontology. See language, media)
ontology of reconfiguration of 200–1
linguistics 57, 97 relationships of literature with 211
literacy 47–8 representing other media 121
internalization of 69 specificity, conception of 125, 222
“pure,” of codexspace 75–6 n.2
literary 150–2, 159, 162, 222 n.2 style, compared with Barthes’s
art 6 conception of 124–5
forms 4, 154–5 system of 118
objects 29–31, 71–2, 77, 134, 144 media-constituted diegesis 115–16,
virtuality 80–1 119–20, 123, 125–6, 185
literature 149–63, 211–21 instances of 189
eventual nature and position of 152 of painting 126–7
long-standing characteristics of 49 of photography 124
“our preferred and privileged principles of 188
institution of cultural authority” representation of writing 120–32
47 media-constituted (diegetic) worlds 129
range and extent of 211 Melville, Herman 194
Liu, Alan 149–50, 152, 155–8, 160 Memmott, Talan 60
Loose Links (Cayley) 207 Menard, Pierre 141
(P)LOs. See (plastic) literary objects Mennie, K. M. 223 n.5
mesostic(s) 20–2, 24–7, 29–30, 36
Mac Low, Jackson 20–1, 36, 58, 69, hologogram 30
71, 86 process 233–4 n.1, 237 n.10
Magritte, René 121–3, 126–8, 130, 131 structures 87
Markov models/chains 136, 145, 158, text, folded into the generated text
249 n.7, 254 n.22 86–7
materiality 54, 64, 84, 112, 204 metapicture(s) 118, 122
embracing temporalization 112–14 Miller, Tyrus 234 n.11
288 INDEX
Mitchell, W. J. T. 118, 121, 122 “old” media 80, 118–19

Monoclonal Microphone (Cayley) optical character recognition (OCR)
190–2, 194, 195 209–10
Montfort, Nick 194, 195, 206 OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature
Moods & Conjunctions (Cayley) 22, Potentiel) 58
25–6 overboard (Cayley) 86–8, 93
multilingualism 62
painting 80, 115, 120–3, 126–7, 129
naming 148–51 digitization of 120
issues of 148 figurative 131
natural language 61–2, 99–100, 187, Magritte’s 128, 130, 131
206–7. See also language media-constituted diegetic world of
(big) data 5, 176 126–8, 131
phrases 145 media system of 122
natural language processing (NLP) 5, of writing 127
143, 200, 209–10 paper 80, 162
natural linguistic images 207 Derrida on 8, 153–4, 156
Nelson, Ted 48, 108–12, 136, 153 thin, as if transparent or to be
network 7, 165–70 passed through/over 80–1,
computing systems 72 130–1
Indra’s Net 20 (see also Indra’s Net) parallelism (in Chinese poetics) 17,
media 124 223 n.8
services, human interaction with paratext(ual) 9
177, 182, 197, 216 elements 84
triumphalism 166–7 programming 101–4
networked and programmable media. Pastior, Oscar 225 n.22
See media, networked and perigrams 254 n.22. See also ngram(s)
programmable Perloff, Marjorie 33–4, 57, 58
New Aesthetics 201–3, 205–6 Perl poetry 100
new media 53–4, 80, 116, 119, 231 photographic naturalism 124, 189–90,
n.16 202, 204
affordances of 134 photographs/photography 123–6
language of (Manovich) 118 media-constituted diegesis of 124
literal art in 236 n.7 photo-naturalism. See photographic
literary rhetoric in 100 naturalism
“logic-as-literature” in 65 pictorial turn (Mitchell) 118, 121, 242
poetics (of) 95, 98 n.2
writing of 95 plagiarism 251 n.16
ngram(s) 249 n.7, 260 n.22 anticipatory (see anticipatory
NLP. See natural language processing plagiarism/plagiarists)
(NLP) creative 47
non-linear poetics 17–18, 223 n.7 and writing to be found 137
noth’rs (Cayley) 30 Plato 215
poetic/poetics
object-oriented programming 107, 122 conceptual 142, 149
OCR. See optical character recognition concrete 58, 84, 123, 131
(OCR) cybertextual 30, 36, 66–77
Oisleánd (Cayley) 30 digital (see digital poetics)
INDEX 289
discourse 33 Radical Artifice (Perloff) 33, 57

literature 231 n.17 Raley, Rita 95, 102
reconfiguration 201 codework, characterization of 98–9
writing 33, 95 readability 186, 193, 215, 220
poetry 8–10, 16–23, 26–7, 29, 30–1, of code, by humans 63
36, 211 of code, by machines 187
Poetry Clock (Williams) 27 convergence of readabilities 215
poststructuralism/ist 48, 147, 152, 265 of language, by humans 187, 193
n.16 “scales” of 193
and punctuation 102 of writing 165
Pound, Ezra 147 reader interaction 17, 25, 27, 30, 75
presence/absence dialectic 54–8, 65, reading 166, 188, 195
102 of audiobooks 220
Primary Source (Capone) 208, 210 “catastrophic” aspect 3, 189,
print/printing 162, 178 190–1, 193, 214–15
culture 107 culture(s) of 188, 195–6, 220
textuality 80, 213 distant 196–7
process of reading. See reading, grammaleptic 2–3, 10, 214
process(es) of and hearing/understanding 97
programmability. See programmable human 188–9, 193, 195–7
media language, constitutive of 2–5, 188, 213
programmable media 7, 49, 59, mode of 72, 220
65–6, 86, 89, 93, 101–2, 112–13, neo-Romantic world of 166
148–9, 156, 255 n.8 overriding the “read” method
computation 187–8 104–8
and configuration 12 performance(s) of 65, 188, 195
disruptions of 72 performative 194–5
literary work in 86 process(es) of 81, 106
machines 81 regardless of support medium 214
and reconfiguration 12 strategies 76, 80, 90, 144
textuality of 102 through (see “reading through”)
writing for 88–9 visual “reading” 190
programmatology 7, 47–50, 229 n.1 ways of 134
and language 65 “reading through” 58, 144
and objects 59 “read” method 104–8
and systems 57 reconfiguration(s) 199–210
programmaton 7, 47, 187 cultural 162
programming 49 of language 205
mis-assimilation of 49–50 reconfigurationist 12, 201, 208, 210
realms of 158 representations of language/writing.
skills 17, 31, 157 See language, representation of
and writing 49–50 Retallack, Joan 79, 80, 93, 236 n.3
psychoanalysis 53 “Reveal Code Aesthetic” 57
publication, institutions of 80 Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)
“pure literacy” of codexspace 75–6 157
“purely oral” language art 75 RISD. See Rhode Island School of
Design (RISD)
Queneau, Raymond 58, 195 RiverIsland (Cayley) 30
290 INDEX
Roberts, Andrew Michael 221 n.5 “telephonic literature” 148

robot(s) 179–81 “televisual literature” 148
robotic cognition 135 temporality 80, 110–13
robotic processes 179, 181 cultivation and articulation of 112
Rosenberg, Jim 19, 36, 37, 108, 113, form(s) of 112
234 n.8, 239 n.28, 241 n.49 of language 215
coding of programmable programming aspects of 113
media 107 of reading 214
intergram(s) 112 terms of reference 165–83
programmed signifiers 104–8 terms of service 181–2
textual elements of 110 terms of use 176, 180
text 47, 97
“scales” of readability 193 animation of 81, 112
semiotic material (Vološinov) 2, 217 corpus/corpora 133, 136–8, 145,
serious hypertext 222 n.3 248 n.1
socialization of automatic speech in the docuverse 108–10
recognition 220 generators 4–5, 18–22, 24–30, 49,
social networking 162–3 64–6
Soderman, A. Braxton 158–60 kinetic potential of 65 (see also text,
software 34, 36–7, 71, 98. See also Big animation of)
Software materiality of 95, 109, 113
compositional process, part of 20–2 spatialization of (in hypertext)
and peripherals 35 103
Sondheim, Alan 61, 99 structures of 65
source code. See code temporal dimensions of 10, 87
Speaking Clock (Cayley) 27, 29–30 “Text” class 239 n.29
speech act theory 57 text generation 4–5, 18, 22, 27, 70,
speech synthesis 200, 216, 220 74, 108, 136. See also text,
“steam literature” 148 generators
Stefans, Brian Kim 158 Markov models for 136
Stiegler, Bernard 215 program 226 n.27
Strickland, Stephanie 194, 195 text(ual) movie(s) 30, 49–50
structuralism 54, 57 textonomy (Aarseth) 108, 229 n.1
Sullivan, Gary 248 n.3 textual event 109, 110–11
surfaces/surfacing 86–8, 213. See also textuality 107, 111, 234 n.13. See also
complex surface(s) text
complexity 93 characteristics of 96, 101
language 225 n.21 of complex surfaces 93
of writing 82–3, 86 conception of 81, 97, 101–2
surveillance 201 in literary criticism 97, 113
symbolic image(s) 12, 201–8 neglected property of 81
generation of 204 notions of 97
in language 206–7 operational programming in (code)
synthesis of 205 101
symbolic practice 115, 119 print-based 80, 213
distant reading of 196 of programmable media 102
universal 187 time/temporality, neglected property
syntagmatic “flow” 124–6, 245 n.24 of 81
INDEX 291
textual materiality 109. See also text, virtual linguistic artifacts 188, 190,
materiality of 193–5
textual programming 72 virtual linguistic forms 214
textual transition effects 50 virtual reality (VR) 9–10, 53, 89
three-dimensional space, writing in visibility, as an aspect of language’s
22–3, 115–31 specific materiality 113
time (with respect to code and “visible language” 15–16
language) 8, 10, 95–114. visualizations 202
See also language, temporal/ visual poetry 22–4, 210. See also
temporalization Indra’s Net
code generates literal time 112–14 voice 12, 75–6, 116
hypertextual dissolutions 103–4 and language 185–97
and literal institutions 111–12 services 200
punctuation colon programming VR. See virtual reality (VR)
102–3
“traditional” delivery media 69, 98 Wark, McKenzie 167
traditional literary media 110 Wikipedia 138–9, 168
transactive synthetic language (TSL) 12, Williams, Emmett 20, 27, 58, 86
199, 200, 216, 217, 264–5 n.15 windsound (Cayley) 30
transclusion (Nelson) 47 wine flying (Qian Qi; Cayley
transfiguration, translation as, in trans.) 19
WordLens 209 WordLens (app) 208, 209
transgression 177–9 configuration of events 210
human vs. robotic 179 WordNet 158
multiple 181 word processing 55–6, 178–9
negative connotation of 177 World Wide Web 15, 69–70, 74
translation (Cayley) 86–9, 93 writers/writing 8–9, 15, 17, 27, 37, 48,
The Treachery of Images (Magritte) 72, 122, 165–6, 188
121–3, 126–8, 130 avant-garde 61, 72 (see also avant-
trigrams 254 n.22. See also ngram(s) garde)
“True Search” 169 contemporary practices of 165
TSL. See transactive synthetic language digital media (see “writing digital
(TSL) media”)
Turing Test, foreclosed by transactive dimensionless surface of 80–1
synthetic language 216 distorted representation of 129
Twitter 11–12, 160–3 experimental 48–9
typewriting 55, 178 formal conservatism of 152
typography, digitization of 213 forms of 154–5
innovative 48–9, 61
ultimate poetry (Williams) 20, 225 neo-Romantic world of 166
n.21 operative in 65
Under It All (Cayley) 21–5 practices of 80, 165
“universal” symbolic practice, Western procedures of 143
association of language with 187 processes of 49, 81, 133
for programmable media 88–9
Valla, Clement 159, 160, 202–4 programmatological dimension of
virtual language 5, 188, 195, 206, 216 232 n.31
generation of 187–8 readers 133–45
292 INDEX
representation of 120–32 overboard and translation 86–8

surface of 80–3, 86 symbolic on 93
ways of 134
“writing digital media” 7, 117, 140, 144, Xie Ye 27
151–2, 157, 159, 160, 255 n.8
writing surfaces 79–81 Yelling at a Wall: Textron Eat Shreds
on Cave walls 88–93 (Katko and Valla) 159
complexity of 87, 89

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ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3576-1

Series: Electronic Literature

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2 Pressing the “REVEAL CODE” key 33

6.1 Still from the opening titles, designed by Saul Bass,

Visualization. Photographs courtesy of Francisco J.

The collection of essays in Grammalepsy brings its author and its

Despite our inevitable discontents and the constant vigilance that is

language art. I maintain an online, mildly transactive, version of the essay

us. Obviously, I’m bracketing certain conceptions of materiality—placing

“have”—language. And our evolutionary disposition is unlikely to change

Why set out, in an introduction to this book, by proposing and then

text generation, translation, and reconfiguration are all important in my

kind of practitioner who never works without a more or less articulated

“hypertext” when these circulated together in the first decade of accessible

With “Writing to Be Found” and “Terms of Reference” the theoretical

ideologically implicated, and also historical in the sense of changing what

necessarily, shared by human animals as we become, continually, language

screen, printer, speaker, and as yet undreamed-of appliances and peripherals,

Scoring the spelt air

by the object’s generational procedures.13 This amounts to one potential

An advantage of using software to produce this kind of work is the

Indra’s Net and visual poetry

FIGURE 1.3 Scaled-down, monochrome version of the “three-dimensional” poster

One of these is represented on the cover of a paper publication which

representations could be animated and translated for the computer screen

FIGURE 1.4 Screenshot from “Critical Theory” in Collocations: Indra’s Net II.

Collocations also includes a sampler of earlier work and one essay in

Moods & Conjunctions

The Speaking Clock

performing a mesostic transformation on a 365-word given text. The words

(Plastic) Literary Objects

on offer in the world of contemporary poetics, remains recognizable as

There was and is no obvious way to conclude the brief, expository

narrow formal attention that was a function of most early explorations

The COMPUTER is (an integral part of) the

quotes, “the on-ness of the computer is alien to any sort of relation we

INVARIANT inACCURATE SYSTEMS never

The COMPUTER is not (a part of) THE

FAMILIARITY breeds CONTEMPT. INTIMACY

Software sHifts poetIcs, iF riTers prEss:

Rosenberg responds to the notion that agents of the system—unrevealed,

before your eyes

her attention and response

this is an integral part of the system against which we write

the computer is an integral part of the system

manipulating certain literary texts

its engineering evolves

the formulaic control

information processing by humans

inflected by these systems

without pressing the

the computer becomes an entirely different kind of medium

these agents are themselves constructed

the manipulation of poetic texts

2 Pressing the “REVEAL CODE” key 33